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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A CLUB 



" A CLUB '» 

'An assembly of good fellows" 



BY 

ONE OF THE MEMBERS 



^ry<ij^' 



4X s. -.Ih^^^' 



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

MCMXIV 






REPRINTED FROM 

Essays and Miscellanies 
BY Joseph S. Auerbach 

AS A GIFT BOOK TO 

The Members of A CLUB 

COPTEIGHT, 1914, BY HARPER & BROTHERS. 



APR 24-)«f4 



CI.A37152G 



A CLUB 

In memory of long, unbroken comradeship with fine fellows 
and beautiful streams and woods and fields, this rambling jour- 
ney is affectionately inscribed as the tribute of the lover to them 
all. 



A CLUB 

An assembly of good fellows. — Dr. JohnsorCs Dictionary* 

NOT far from the confusion and exactions 
of the great city, out amid the oaks and 
pines of Long Island, that grow big and stately 
enough if given elbow-room for air and sun- 
shine, are the many acres to which we are to 
journey together. They belong, some of the 
uninitiated say, to a club, though really no 
club, in the popular acceptation of the word, 
has anything to do with their ownership. 
Rather are they the priceless possession of a 
few men bound together by ties of fellowship, 
the like of which it would not be worth while for 
one to set out in search of, unless prepared to 
go to the ends of the earth — and even then 
without much likelihood of success, Therefore, 

\ 



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if now and then I do call this organization a 
Club, you will understand that I have in mind 
some such picture or memory as Dr. Johnson 
must have had, when he defined a club to be "An 
assembly ofgood fellows"; always provided that 
fETs sturdy, genuine scholar and man, when he 
wrote good fellows meant fine fellows, the best 
fellows. 

Even though you have heard of this Club or 
have visited it, you may nevertheless profit by 
this rambling journey we are to make together, 
if you care for God's best handiwork in the 
fashioning of men and of bright skies and woods 
and fields and streams. For as the interpreter, 
if he be the true lover of them, can point out in 
rare pictures, or books, or other treasures, some 
hidden beauties not apparent to the casual 
glance, so you may learn from me something 
new of the engaging men and the living things 
here. 

At the outset take it for granted that this 
Club has to ordinary Clubdom a relation which 
Bohemia has to places where men sordidly grub 
for mere money and I might add mere fame; 
for fame can be so full of alloy that it is all 
but counterfeit. To understand whether my 



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illustration be good or bad, you must of course 
know how far apart Bohemia and such other 
places are. And inasmuch as no one has 
measured the distance more accurately than has 
John Boyle O'Reilly, let us take him for our 
authority. 

IN BOHEMIA 

I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other land; 

For only there are the values true. 

And the laurels gathered in all men's view. 

The prizes of traffic and state are won 

By shrewdness or force or by deeds undone; 

But fame is sweeter without the feud, 

And the wise of Bohemia are never shrewd. 

Here, pilgrims stream with a faith sublime 

From every class and clime and time. 

Aspiring only to be enrolled 

With the names that are writ in the book of gold; 

And each one bears in mind or hand 

A palm of the dear Bohemian land. 

The scholar first with his book — a youth 

Aflame with the glory of harvested truth; 

A girl with a picture, a man with a play, 

A boy with a wolf he has modeled in clay; 

A smith with a marvelous hilt and sword, 

A player, a king, a plowman, a lord — 

And the player is king when the door is past. 

The plowman is crowned, and the lord is last! 

I'd rather fail in Bohemia than win in another land; 

There are no titles inherited there. 

No hoard or hope for the brainless heir; 

No gilded dullard native born 

To stare at his fellow with leaden scorn: 



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Bohemia has none but adopted sons; 
Its limits, where Fancy's bright stream runs; 
Its honours, not garnered for thrift or trade. 
But for beauty and truth men's souls have made. 
To the empty heart in a jeweled breast. 
There is value, maybe, in a purchased crest; 
But the thirsty of soul soon learn to know 
The moistureless froth of the social show; ^ 
The vulgar sham of the pompous feast 
Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest; 
The organized charity, scrimped and iced. 
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ; 
The smile restrained, the respectable cant, ^ 
When a friend in need is a friend in want; 
Where the only aim is to keep afloat. 
And a brother may drown with a cry in his 

throat. 
Oh, I long for the glow of a kindly heart and the 

grasp of a friendly hand. 
And I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other 

land. 

Well that has a generous swing to it you 
must admit, as we re-hear the lines. Doubtless 
Emerson would have considered O'Reilly very 
low in the poetic scale, for even Poe was to 
him only the "jingle" poet; and Shelley too 
we recall came under his ban. We need not, 
however, be concerned about a defense of either 
of them, for they stand now on a pinnacle 
before which all men do homage. Yet we are 
all entitled to have for such transgressions in 
judgment an irritation, not unlike that which 



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Horace expressed over tlie occasional poetic nap 
of Homer. 

Nevertheless, the haven and refuge I am 
speaking of is better than all Bohemia; for 
Bohemia is on the border land if not within the 
province of Fame or Devil-caredom, and is often 
the resort of the notables or the Boulevardiers of 
life; while this place to which we are journey- 
ing, and within which, if you have just a bit of 
fancy, you have already arrived, is divided only 
by an imaginary line from the fields of pure 
content. 

By the way, a friend of mine a physician of 
this City, ripe now in wisdom and professional 
distinction, told me of an experience of his with 
O'Reilly which may have some passing interest. 
The two were rooming together in Boston, where 
one was ministering to the body diseased and 
the other, by editorial work to the mind in need 
of journalistic nourishment, which O'Reilly, in 
his best moments, could furnish abundantly. 
The young physician, had for some slight fri- 
voHty, been unceremoniously turned out of a 
noted sea-food restaurant in Boston by its 
proprietor, a crusty, uncompromising old bach- 
elor. He thereupon besought O'Reilly to pour 

5 



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out a few vials of newspaper wrath upon the 
head of such a tyrant; but O'Reilly devised a 
more subtle punishment. Accordingly, day by 
day, when walking in company to their offices, 
they would stop for a moment when passing the 
restaurant and say in unison, "The Lord damn 

" One day, on arriving there and 

finding it temporarily closed and crepe on the 
door, O'Reilly's comment was: "Well, you see 
my plan was the better, for our petition has been 
granted and the Lord has damned him." 

I have told you how far away this Club is 
from Clubdom, but it is still further from the 
world of affairs. If I were to attempt to tell 
you how far it, as well as the rest of the self- 
respecting God-fearing world, is from the world 
of the unseemly professional Turkey Trot, — 
where, to use the suggestive current phrase, the 
modern girl is more danced against than danc- 
ing — I might be obliged to have recourse to 
the language of the astronomer, when giving 
the distance of the earth from the fixed stars, 
and state it in so many " Light years." Perhaps 
the mother, engrossed in duties or pleasures, 
often fails to notice how treacherously slippery 
is the floor and how unwholesome the atmos- 

6 



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''■* 

phere of this dance frenzy and orgy, or appre- 
ciate what little effort the man - milliner and 
social rounder over there would really put forth 
to save that daughter from a fall — ^if amid such 
surroundings she grow giddy with the whirl and 
lose her footing. 

Well, you may be right in thinking all this 
the occasion for the jeremiad and anathema of 
the preacher, and the sneer and paradox of the 
cynic, and not a matter for me to be venture- 
some enough to express opinions about. Yet if 
observation counts for much, some of these 
professional censors are so inclined to the super- 
lative in expression, that not everything they 
may have to say is always accepted at its face 
value. Or again, they grow drowsy on their 
watch, and, now and then, it may well be the 
privilege of the layman to volunteer as a sen- 
tinel in the outposts. 

Whether among the members of this guild — 
or Club, if you will have it so — there are men of 
distinction in the professions and in business, 
no one knows or cares once its waters and woods 
and fields greet the eye and ear and the thresh- 
olds of its doors are crossed. No one here is 



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catalogued as a human ledger with entries on 
the credit side of only fame or fortune, gained 
at the sacrifice of much that is worth while in 
the world; though with such a debit side of 
ungratified joy, that the balance, when struck, 
gives warning that the life recorded there is 
all but bankrupt. 

Therefore they are hospitable, and you, 
though the stranger within their gates, will be 
permitted to know the indefinable charm of this 
miniature world set apart as it is from the rest 
of man's work and God's work — where there is 
wholesome contempt for much that never can 
have aught in common with such a place of 
delight. Surely if at all responsive to the 
appeal which the best of mankind and of nature 
is making to us all — though many of us un- 
fortunately have such poor hearing — ^you will 
have some faint notion of the obligation you 
are under, at being asked to make this visit 
with me, once you have really learned of these 
men and of their possessions here. 

There are, however, some suggestions you 

must not fail to give heed to, if you would be 

quite welcome and profit by your visit. You 

8 



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are not to consider yourself as on parade, or 
strive to be scintillating, or the central figure 
in this democracy of equals. Even though filled 
to overflowing with the brilliant remark, keep 
it for some one who will appreciate it better than 
would these men, at least while here. Or if it 
be really clever, keep it for them at other times 
and places where amid the ordinary, earthy 
things of life it will be ensured a hospitable 
hearing. You might spend no end of time 
within these old walls, with their old fittings 
and associations, and hallowed memories, yet 
not hear the egotistic speech, the story an- 
nounced at the outset to be "funny " or the 
attempt to air one's importance or knowledge. 
Anecdotage need not expect to win prizes in this 
place. Modesty holds court here, and the 
spirit of the injunction of the father to the son 
starting off for his journey into the world, not 
to show his gold watch until he was asked what 
time it was, is part of our unwritten consti- 
tution. And when the member is asked for 
information you will notice how unostenta- 
tiously it is forthcoming. 

Still you must not for a moment consider 
that there is lack of wit or of its appreciation 

2 9 



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among these men; quite the contrary, or they 
would not be as they are, men of such superior 
judgment. For, rightly interpreted, are not 
wit and judgment companion traits and but 
different manifestations of a knowledge of the 
wise things of the world? To end all doubt on 
the subject, read ■ the brilliant chapter of one 
of the great books of the world, past, present 
or to come — Sterne's "digression" in Tristam 
Shandy y on the two "heavenly emanations," 
the two "ornamental knobs of the chair." You 
will find there, too, as satisfactory evidence as 
anywhere else in his writings, the genius of this 
man whom many in this day and generation 
have forgotten or else with whom, to their loss 
and shame, they have never become acquainted. 
In this refuge from boredom there are no such 
exhibitions of the vanity and selfishness Swift 
refers to: 

For instance, nothing is more generally exploded 
than the folly of talking too much; yet I rarely re- 
member to have seen five people together where 
some one among them hath not been predominant 
in that kind, to the great constraint and disgust of 
all the rest. But among such as deal in multitudes 
of words, none are comparable to the sober, deliber- 
ate talker, who proceedeth with much thought and 
caution, maketh his preface, brancheth out into 

10 



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several digressions, findeth a hint that putteth him 
in mind of another story, which he proceedeth to tell 
you when this is done; cometh back regularly to his 
subject, cannot readily call to mind some persons, 
holdeth his head; complaineth of his memory; the 
whole company all the while in suspense; at length, 
says he, it is no matter, and so goes on. And to 
crown the business it perhaps proveth at last a story 
the company hath heard fifty times before; at best 
some insipid adventure of the relator. 

As we hear such words, we are entitled to have 
the comforting thought that we may be wrong 
in our misgivings as to the time present — 
seeing that in some respects at least, the seven- 
teenth century was not radically different from 
the twentieth. May it not well be that many 
a modern-day tendency in our political and 
social life, regarded by us as an new disease, is 
but a new symptom of an incurable disease as 
old and likely to continue as long as the hills? 
Perhaps Gilbert, of Gilbert-Sullivan fame, was 
right in putting on his "list" the one (char- 
acterized by him as the idiot, if I remember 
rightly) 

who praises with enthusiastic tone 
All centuries but this and every country but his own. 

Let me tell you something else of this place, 

which you will cease to be incredulous about, 

11 



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or surprised at, if ever you become one of us. 
We shall not be unaccompanied in our journey. 
Wherever we go together there will be with us 
the cheery spirit of many a former member — 
permitted to come back from the majority he 
has joined, whenever upon the lips or in the 
thoughts of a friend and companion of his life 
here in days of old his memory is recalled. 
Why, the members who still fish and talk and 
play here in earthly fashion, knowing full well 
how limited the loss was to be, did not even 
mourn as those without hope, at the passing 
out of their lives of these others. The tears 
and the sighs were few because the living knew 
that the separation was not to be real, as under- 
stood by the uninitiated. If these others were 
to leave a void here, there would be quite a dif- 
ferent story to tell. We know, however, that 
when they cease to come again by train or 
motor-car, they will yet come in other fashion — 
on the winds and in all other ways congenial 
to those who people the spirit world. There 
is merely to be a change in the order of the 
coming of those who go away, to become — 
suppose we say non-resident members. 

There is nothing so strange that in our com- 

12 



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pany are to be these others; for how many of 
the ghostly beings, whose dwelling-place is the 
world of our thoughts, have ever lived at all 
save in the minds of gifted, inspired men? 
Without much tax upon your memory, you can 
call the long roll of such creations of the imagi- 
nation; and without them as our companions 
day by day we do not really live our lives. 

Do you have in mind Lamb's Dream Chil- 
dren? Well, if not, at the first opportunity 
take the volume from the library shelf or the un- 
visited garret or wherever else you may be able 
to come across it, and after ridding it of the 
accumulated dust read the little story again. 
Then if you will not believe and know that his 
dream children were real children, as real as was 
his "fair Alice," you may be sure we shall have 
made this journey together in vain. 

You recall how, after Colonel Newcome has 
answered "Adsum" as his name was called and 
stands in the presence of the Master — and the 
story is all told — Thackeray adds: 

As I write the last line with a rather sad heart, 
Pendennis and Laura, and Ethel and Olive fade away 
into Fableland. I hardly know whether they are 
not true; whether they do not live near us some- 

13 



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where. They were alive and I heard their voices; 
but five minutes since I was touched by their grief; 

and keeps "a lingering hold of your hand and 
bids you farewell with a kind heart." 

Yes, Thackeray was right if he believed that 
they had lived, and wrong if he doubted it; for 
to us they have just as much lived as has he 
himseK, who is of the immortals only in the 
creations of his own genius. 

Have you had the good fortune to read the 
touching, exquisite tribute of Barrie to Mere- 
dith.? 

All morning there had been a little gathering of 
people outside the gate. It was the day on which 
Mr. Meredith was to be, as they say, buried. He 
had been, as they say, cremated. The funeral 
coach came, and a very small thing was placed in it 
and covered with flowers. One plant of the wall- 
flower in the garden would have covered it. The 
coach, followed by a few others, took the road to 
Dorking, where, in a familiar phrase, the funeral 
was to be, and in a moment or two all seemed silent 
and deserted, the cottage, the garden, and Box Hill. 

The cottage was not deserted, as They knew who 
now trooped in to the round in front of it, their 
eyes on the closed door. They were the mighty 
company, his children, Lucy and Clara and Rhoda 
and Diana and Rosa and Old Mel and Roy Rich- 
mond and Adrian and Sir Willoughby and a hun- 
dred others, and they stood in line against the box- 
wood, waiting for him to come out. Each of his 



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proud women carried a flower, and the hands of all 
his men were ready for the salute. 

What a rebuke are such words for our dullness 
of vision! 

How much more then, can we be said to 
continue in the companionship of those com- 
rades who have really lived, and who are now 
the haunting memories of these rooms and 
fields and woods and streams. 

Longfellow, though not always the poet of 
inspiration, with his nobility of soul had often 
miraculous insight into things, as unseen by 
some of us as is the invisible side of the moon. 
Do we not agree with him that Bums still 
"haunts his native land as an immortal youth" 
and that "his hand guides every plow".? 

Are we not sure that the spirit of Robert 
Emmet and of every one that has led a life of 
generous and self-sacrificing thought and deed 
is still in the world.? 

Do we not hear yet the echoing footsteps of 
Dr. Johnson, as he wanders through Fleet 
Street in the gloom of want, and again in the 
sunlight of the plenty which his talents and the 
absence of any taint of hypocrisy or fawning in 
his bluff and generous character were to win for 

15 



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him? Are not the coffee-houses there again filled 
with the Wits of London? 

As we enter Westminster Hall does it require 
much draft upon the imagination to reproduce 
before us the great actors and spectators in that 
imposing drama of life, when Warren Hastings 
was arraigned and impeached by Edmund 
Burke for high crimes and misdemeanors, before 
the bar of English justice? Can we not believe 
that Macaulay — with all his love of gaudy 
coloring which so often caused him to fall 
short of the highest creative work — was en- 
abled with his mind's eye to view as at an 
artist's sitting that momentous scene, before 
he transferred it to his brilliant canvas? 

If we cross the Thames and enter the hallowed 
precincts of Southwark Cathedral, does not the 
spirit of Shakespeare come from the Globe 
Theatre near-by to stand with us at the tomb 
of his brother and of John Gower? 

Are not the streets of Rome still peopled with 
the men who made martial conquest of the earth, 
and the streets of Athens with those who set 
standards for intellectual excellence of all time? 

Does not Barrie, too, make my belief as to 
these absent ones of ours a sure conviction, as he 

X6 



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tells how Meredith himself on that day arose 
and flung wide open the door of the cottage to 
-greet the great company of his creation: 

In the room on the right, in an armchair which had 
been his home for years — to many the throne of 
letters in this country — sat an old man, like one for- 
gotten in*an empty house. When the last sound of 
the coaches had passed away he moved in his chair. 
He wore gray clothes and a red tie, and his face was 
rarely beautiful, but the hair was white and the 
limbs were feeble, and the wonderful eyes dimmed, 
and he was hard of hearing. He moved in his chair, 
for something was happening to him, and it was this : 
old age was falling from him. This is what is meant 
by Death to such as he, and the company awaiting 
knew. His eyes became again those of the eagle, 
and his hair was brown, and the lustiness of youth 
was in his frame, but still he wore the red tie. 

He rose, and not a moment did he remain within 
the house, for "golden lie the meadows, golden run 
the streams," and "the fields and the waters shout 
to him golden shouts." 

Box Hill was no longer deserted. When a great 
man dies — and this was one of the greatest since 
Shakespeare — the immortals await him at the top of 
the nearest hill. He looked up and saw his peers. 
They were all young, like himself. He waved the 
staff in greeting. One, a mere stripling, "slight un- 
speakably," R. L. S., detached himself from the 
others, crying gloriously, "Here's the fellow I have 
been telling you about!" and ran down the hill to 
be the first to take his Master's hand. 

In the mean time an empty coach was rolling on 
to Dorking. 

17 



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Is there much doubt in the minds of any of 
us that there is the "Choir Invisible," and that 
there proceeds from it a mighty, resistless influ- 
ence for the fashioning of the thoughts and the 
words and the deeds of men? 

Perhaps you will bear with me for adding an 
experience of my own. 

Once a child came to our household; but ill 
fitted for the rough, dusty highway of life, he 
made but a short journey along it. His days 
were only sufficient to enable him to know a 
few things, and to lisp a few words. One of 
the things about him which he recognized and 
loved — ^perhaps because it was of such close 
kinship with himself — was the butterfly, and 
one of the words he first learned to utter was 
"Butterf'y." I see him now as I have seen 
him all these years — as clearly as one can see 
through tears — with tiny foot uplifted, to de- 
scend in little emphatic stamp as he said his 
one big word. There came a day when, sum- 
moned to a distant city on a professional er- 
rand, the last I saw of him was as he repeated 
for me with that voice which was all gentle 
music, his Butterf'y. Alas, before my return, 
the spirit of that child which had come out of 

18 



A CLUB 

the unknown to our houseliold as a brief resting- 
spot, had fluttered back to the place whence it 
had come. 

Years went by and now the counterpart of 
this precious memory, another Httle boy of a 
later generation only just a bit sturdier, has 
come into my life. This new-comer is my good 
comrade. Often he takes me by the hand — 
much more than I can be said to take him by 
his hand — and we wander off in the fields to- 
gether, to see the flowers and birds, and talk 
over a good many things which are more worth 
while than some of us at times realize. It is 
true I do most of the talking, for he does not 
yet talk in language that we grown-ups think 
the only means of communicating ideas. Yet 
he expresses his assent and dissent in a way 
clearly understood by himself and quite in- 
telligible to me. Then if his step suggests 
weariness, he climbs to my shoulder and we 
leave the bright skies and continue our com- 
radeship indoors. Always at some part of the 
play, in his own invented way outstretched on 
half -bent knees he hides his face from me away 
down among some banked-up pillows. There- 
upon I am to call the roll of the places where he 

19 



A CLUB 

is not to be found, and he is to answer "No" 
with that musical, rising inflection all his own. 
Finally I must guess where he really is. And 
when — after his mouse-like silence which is 
confession — ^I find him laughing as only he can 
laugh, underneath a shock of golden, sunlight 
curls, I am quite sure then, as I often am, that 
something of that other child has passed into 
the soul and into the face of this gentle, manly 
and beautiful little boy 

No, it would merely be the gratification of a 
foolish curiosity if as you suggest I consent to 
be for you the biographer of these men. More- 
over, there would be a limit to your patience as 
I extolled their virtues — while omitting their 
faults, though for that matter they have none 
worth chronicling. 

I should, however, be remiss if I failed to 
speak of George the First (there are other 
Georges here, good fellows, but of course only 
one George the First); George Rex! George 
Imperator! No, there is nothing in your point 
that in this democratic land of ours the only 
ruler is an unelected boss, and that this George 
of ours therefore cannot have inherited his 

20 



A CLUB 

office but must have been elected. For tbough 
the statement be without the support of con- 
stitution or by-laws, it is nevertheless true that 
his term of office is imlimited. The members, 
voting in their own right, and as the holders 
of the proxies of these unseen non-resident mem- 
bers, merely go through the annual farce of 
perpetuating in office this man, who is the 
office. Even were he not the whole-souled fel- 
low we all know him to be, and were he at 
times crusty, as he never is, it is doubtful if we 
should let him resign his high office, so capably 
does he administer it. Let me give you an il- 
lustration : In years gone by, the big pond over 
there would uniformly, as the season advanced, 
become a mass of uninviting weeds, despite the 
fact that the Club set many of its employees at 
work to pull them out and then transport them 
to the barnyard, to fatten the ducks kept there 
for that purpose. So this good old practice of 
the Peterkins here would doubtless have gone 
on till judgment day but for this President, 
who reasoned thus: Why always weeds to the 
ducks and never ducks to the weeds? So it 
was resolved; and if you visit us again later 
in the year you will witness the industrious, 

21 



A CLUB 

talkative snow- white "Pekins" on the pond at 
their task of which they never weary and from 
which no weed need ever expect to survive. 
Then, too, we still have the toothsome, fat 
duck for the table. There are other rea- 
sons a-plenty for our canniness as well as 
our sentiment, in keeping in office such a 
resourceful as well as a beloved administra- 
tor. 

I forbear exhausting your patience with tell- 
ing you of the others like him. But I am too 
wise to fall into the inadvertence of the writer 
who, desiring to sum up a like situation in brief 
but comprehensive fashion, had the misfortune 
to trifle with the imported phrase: Ab uno disce 
omnes. Unfortunately it was a quotation which 
ripped out of its context was made to do service 
never intended by the author, who was classify- 
ing the wicked by reason of the transgression 
of one offender. So I shall not venture out of 
my depth, but answer in my native and not in 
borrowed foreign speech dead or living, that 
many of the others are an approach to our 
George in loveableness. As planets they neces- 
sarily get some of the reflected light of his ways. 
Nevertheless, I may later on if the day or 



A CLUB 

night be long enough, say a word or two to you 
of these others. 

This quotation adventure, by the way, is not 
commended to the inexperienced. The clever- 
est sometimes fall into a trap; and lawyer-like 
I give you, as I shall again and again, the 
support of good authority. 

In one of the early cases which determined 
the true interpretation of the commerce clause 
of our Federal Constitution, a distinguished 
advocate was seeking to persuade the Supreme 
Court of the United States that the decision of 
the Court of last resort of the State of New 
York was right in holding that this State had, 
by the statute it had enacted, properly granted 
exclusive rights for the navigation of the Hudson 
River. Momentous consequences were involved 
in the outcome. The federal government was 
insisting that any such interpretation would 
throttle industry, and leave the United States 
in little if any better position as a nation, than 
under the Articles of Confederation after the 
arms of the Revolution had been laid down. 

The favor of the statute was intended in 
large part as the just reward of a generous 

23 



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State for the history-making steamboat inven- 
tion of Fulton. In his argument the advocate 
eloquently urged this view, and in his rhetorical 
peroration undertook also, by the quotation of a 
line from Virgil, to depict the stimulus to indus- 
try and inventive energy and the national pros- 
perity which would result, if the interpretation 
of the Courts of New York were upheld by the 
Supreme Court of the United States: 

QucB regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? 

It would have been an apt and telling quota- 
tion, if the counsel had been right in his suppo- 
sition that the laboris referred to enterprise and 
prosperity. Unfortunately he left out of his 
calculations the other meaning of labor — travail 
and misfortune, which it there signified. As 
you recall, the line is only part of the words of 
iEneas, who in his wandering with Achates from 
Troy has reached Carthage, where he is about 
to recount to Dido the destruction of his be- 
loved city. As he sees upon the walls of the 
portals of her palace the graphic pictures 
which depict the ruin of all that had been 
dear to him in the world, he cries out in his 
bitterness: 

24 



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Conslitit et lachrymans Quis jam locus inquit Achate 
Quae regio in terris nostri non 'plena lahoris? 

The Attorney-General of the United States 
Government, in reply gave the quotation in 
full, and dealt a crushing blow to the argument 
of his adversary. For, considering the per- 
sonnel of the Supreme Court at that time, it 
is difficult — as I will explain to you at another 
time if you are interested in the subject — ^to 
estimate the far-reaching influence this mis- 
quotation exerted. 

I might add, that for the solace of the advo- 
cate the record of the case was so arranged as 
to make his error less conspicuous and em- 
barrassing. Curiously enough, a well-known 
book of classical quotations in my possession 
makes the same error. 

One more illustration of the misquotation 
habit, and I shall have done. A case was being 
argued some time since, before a well-known 
Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey, now gone to his 
rest. He was an accomplished scholar as well 
as a wise judge. The perturbed advocate who 
was thus spurning a concession of his opponent: 

Timeo Danaos dona ferentes, 
a 25 



A CLUB 

realized that the Judge, whose closed eyes sug- 
gested the judicial nap, was quite awake. For 
with aroused look and scholarly eye aflame, the 
Judge interposed, "et dona ferentes, my friend, 
even though they bear gifts " ; the emphasis on the 
"ei." And with a smile for a literary reprimand 
he added, "But may your reference to legal 
authorities have no such fatal omission." 

So, you see, I am avoiding any such pitfalls 
or bramble-bushes as one meets with by rushing 
at random upon quotations which are often 
about as serviceable to the user, as the hook 
to the fish that takes a fancy to the artificial fly. 

I wonder whether you will consider it a fail- 
ure to keep the promise just made to recount 
to you no more instances of misquotation, if 
I speak of a chronological mess into which I 
once heard a well-known legislator of this State 
stumble? 

An unfinished case in court at Albany made 
it necessary for me to remain there until the 
day following. During the evening I wandered 
into the Senate Chamber, where there was a 
debate of much interest between the Republican 
leader of the Republican party then in control 
of the Legislature, and the minority Democratic 

26 



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leader — each of whom has gone to such reward 
as may be the portion of the politician here- 
after. The debate was over the proposed 
passage of a bill which the minority leader was 
attempting in his declamatory style, to demon- 
strate would be a denial of the right of home 
rule to the City of New York. He accordingly 
pictured himself as a very modern. Democratic 
Horatius on a Tammany Bridge repelling the 
attacks of the Huns and Vandals of the Re- 
publican party upon the city, for whose safety 
he seemed prepared to run such risks. 

The brilliant Republican leader did not let 
this opportunity for rejoinder pass when his 
time came, for he said something after this 
order: The Senator from the Dis- 
trict is quite confused in his recollection of 
history or legend, for Horatius had long been 
gathered to his fathers when the Huns and 
Vandals descended upon the Imperial City. 
Yet there was a time when Rome was saved 
from ruin by the cackling of geese; and perhaps 
what the gentleman wishes to communicate to 
this body, is not that he is a hero on a bridge, 
but merely a modern-day representative of that 
wide-awake and one-time-sacred flock. 

27 



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Now, returning to the point we were dis- 
cussing, what more in common conscience could 
you wish to know of these members? Little, 
unless you are of those accustomed to appraise 
success in life merely by distinction in the 
clinic, the court-room, or the market-place. 
Only let me add, do not fall into the error of 
having recourse here to wrong standards for 
measuring real worth, for you would thus make 
shipwreck of your candidacy, however great 
your desire to be one of us some day. For you 
will, in a sense, be under scrutiny by those here 
in spirit as well as in bodily presence, who are 
to vote on your election. Remember always 
that one of the conditions on which the non- 
resident members have given proxies to the 
resident members is, that they are revocable if 
this implied understanding ever be departed 
from: No one, for the reason alone that he has 
been born with or achieved distinction or had 
it thrust upon him, shall be other than an 
intruder on this holy ground. 

For the qualifications of a candidate, no 
search is made in the College of Heraldry as 
to his ancient lineage: his blood is not tested to 
determine whether it is extremely blue; the 

28 



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records of the tax office are not ransacked to 
ascertain the extent of his accumulations; nor 
is he required to produce his LL.D. and M.A. 
sheepskin testimonials of great learning. On 
the contrary, like Napoleon, the candidate can 
be his own ancestor; but he must be wise and 
generous, and have at least red blood, and the 
proof of his good-fellowship must be incontro- 
vertible. Then the applicant may become, in 
that phrase of O'Reilly's, an "adopted son." 

You must not look here for things banal or 
new, which the world often sets too much 
store by; and you must readjust some modern- 
day notions which — at least while here in this 
spot — we long ago consigned to the limbo where 
all foolish notions should be consigned. 

There are to be seen here old rooms, old 
fittings, old appointments; for you will readily 
understand that those who are of the "dear 
guest and ghost" membership could not be 
expected to re- visit strange and therefore unin- 
viting surroundings. And without such mem- 
bership this Club would indeed have an un- 
fillable void. There, too, is the old mill over 
whose dam still run the musical waters as 
they have run through the long years — since 

i^9 



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the days of the Revolution our pleasing his- 
torian Gherardi tells us. Yet chief among the 
old things you will find here, is the survival of 
that fellowship which makes each member in 
this loyal, royal circle a man and a brother. 
If you profit by this visit you will surely flout 
the cheap assertions that environment has not 
often a determining influence on men's disposi- 
tions and conduct. For change the surround- 
ings never so slightly, and the living humans 
themselves here have changed too; and of course 
the ghosts are gone, since they would not 
tolerate the iconoclast in these hallowed pre- 
cincts. You may be sure the "resident" mem- 
bers would never run the risk of such a calamity. 
Do not, however — with your astigmatic vis- 
ion as to this place and these men — which will 
continue until you are fitted by me or some- 
one else with right glasses to look through — - 
entertain the view that with my extended 
monologue we are not progressing toward this 
land I am picturing to you. It is essential that 
we take the festina lente gait in our journey. 
Otherwise the woods and fields and streams and 
the men, too, might then appear to you as not 
unlike other woods and fields and streams and 

30 



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men; and you could not possibly be guilty of 
any more foolish error. 

So I shall digress now and then in order that 
you may get the several points of view you will 
need, from which to see these men and these 
things understandingly. And always remember 
that the digression is the antithesis of trans- 
gression. 

Sterne never got fairly started with his story; 
but one "digression" after another took posses- 
sion of him, and the masterpiece was finished 
before the story had been begun. What an 
irreparable loss it would be if the prefaces of 
the chapters of Thackeray and Fielding — their 
digressions — ^had never been penned. There- 
fore level at me none of your complaints for 
my wanderings as if they were an offense. 
Remember, too, how often I return to firm 
ground, as I present to you these men through 
the sayings of the Masters. So I shall quote 
from them again and again and make it clear 
to you how much better it is to have me string 
together some of the wise things others have 
said, than to strive for so-called originality, 
-^-which sometimes is a label for queer com- 

31 



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pounds. An Irishman, a justice in one of our 
minor district courts, who was more distin- 
guished for his wit than for his legal learning, 
once said to me that his court was properly 
enough called one of original jurisdiction, be- 
cause it was the source of so much original law. 
And how much more enjoyment we should bring 
to ourselves and be the source of for others, if 
we stifled some of our striving after originality ! 
You do not in truth need quotations as a justi- 
fication for my desultory un-original talk. We 
all know the lot of one that goes forward to the 
goal of his ambition on the often uninviting, 
dusty, overcrowded highway — regarding neither 
the left nor the right, turning away from the 
fields and woods and streams and by-paths, 
which all call to him to revel in their beauty. 
The void is greater than the substance of that 
man's life. Ruskin says in his Chapter Ad Valo- 
rem in Unto this Last, which will live when some of 
his more ambitious work will have been forgotten : 

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last 
that all lovely things are also necessary; the wild 
flowers by the wayside as well as the tended corn; 
and the wild birds and creatures of the forest as well 
as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by 
bread only, but also by the desert manna. 

33 



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One who disregards such a view will be 
equally unmindful of the diverting poetic ex- 
cursion, and accordingly the best of life and of 
literature will be a closed book to him. Nor 
ought we to be too sure that the hopeless dull- 
ness of his monotony will serve him in the matter 
of harvesting the fame or money or distinction 
in life, for which he is making such a cruel 
sacrifice. For in the crop thus gathered will 
be found no small proportion of the noxious tare. 

After all, in such a life can there be said to 
be any harvest, since with the harvest there 
is associated in our minds the productive soil, 
the sunlight, the exhilaration of effort. I have 
always thought another illustration more be- 
fitting its description. 

Doubtless, city-bred as you are, you never 
saw the old-fashioned, horse-power-driven, itin- 
erant threshing-machine such as in days gone 
by made its fall visits to the small farms of 
our neighborhood. Its operation involved a 
cruel kind of work even for a horse, which could 
never make progress up or down, backward 
or forward, with all its climbing on and on. 
Merciless enough was that machine, with its 
propped-up, steeply inclined frame, rigid in all 

33 



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but the floor beneath which was to move when 
the grinding began, compelling the horse to 
begin his uphill climb — ^though there was no 
hilltop to reach — or be bruised and crushed as 
he was thrown forward. I see it as I saw it so 
often on our farm, but with the spectacles now 
in my possession, I can make out that there is 
a man in it with hopeless face and stooping 
body as he too climbs to his work. Like the 
horse he is grinding for someone else to profit 
by. As he sweats, but keeps on climbing yet 
never advancing, he cannot enjoy sights — much 
less visions — since there are none unenveloped 
in the dust he is making. Even the humane 
dust-consumer could not appreciably improve 
all this; for, as you see, the back must be bent, 
the head well inclined and the eye on the 
earth or he would not be able to grind at all. 
What a noise there is too! Yet there is no 
good reason why we should be so much con- 
cerned at what is happening, since the man 
knew beforehand that the job he had volun- 
teered for would have nothing to do with pros- 
pects or quiet — ^but was to be only grinding. 
By legislation and by vast expenditures we 
are demanding that the wage-earner, though he 

34. 



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must get his bread by the sweat of the face, 
shall nevertheless not work as one without 
^iope. Yes, now that I think of it with the 
charity born of this place, I was quite incon- 
siderate, about the poor fellow over there in 
that threshing-machine. Surely let us not be 
contemptuous of him, for he is beyond the 
reach of the reclaiming agencies of either stat- 
ute or money. Salvation must be preached to 
him though unfortunately these days are not 
very orthodox. It is a sad case, and I would 
not reflect upon your intelligence to the extent 
of saying that this human threshing-machine 
does not include our Club in its itinerary. 

Those of low as well as of high station, the 
poor as well as the rich, to their discomfort and 
at times their destruction, cling to the idols of 
possessions. 

The appalling sea tragedy seems but yester- 
day, when that proud vainglorious ship sailed 
boastingly out of one harbor never to reach 
another. On the deck of that ship after she 
had foundered, her captain — with what anguish 
only we who knew him intimately will ever 
begin to understand — was directing how others 
were to be saved, with never a thought of him- 

35 



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self. He was to be the last man on deck and 
go down with his ship. He told two of the crew 
to man a life-boat filled with women. As th^ 
captain turned away one of them said to his 
mate, that he would go down to his bunk for 
some of his belongings but be back in a 
moment; the life-boat was launched with a 
substitute who was saved. He who was lost 
doubtless found the things he went in search 
of, but both he and they lie now at the bottom 
of the sea. 

What was true of this sailor is true of many a 
man we have known. Yes, more than this, for 
he perhaps could not afford to part with his 
belongings, while others come to grief in the 
greedy pursuit of the thing for which they have 
no real need. Alas, still others meet their fate 
in the pursuit of the thing which can never 
rightfully be theirs. 

What loathsome, destroying disease can the 
innocent-looking germ of a wrong conception of 
life breed in us. 

We do not have to go back to the classics to 
learn that the bow must be relaxed, if its further 
use be of any moment to its owner. Next to 



A CLUB 

the blessings Sancho Panza invoked for the 
inventor of sleep — and of course they should 
come first — be those for him who invented the 
"digression," not alone for the written book or 
the told story, but for the journey of life. For 
it always keeps men from much monotony and 
grief, and sometimes it saves them from selling 
themselves into slavery. 

Not so much effort after all is needed to 
secure this union of work and play such as you 
see manifest here among the men of this Club. 
Pardon me for giving you by way of illustration 
a leaf out of the book of my own experience. 

Once a valued client — about the beginning of 
June, when the salmon were beginning their 
annual run from the sea — wished my profes- 
sional advice in one of his many money-making 
projects. The salmon was my plea for a vaca- 
tion. He replied that I could go, after what he 
wished me to assist him in accomplishing had 
filled his pockets, and put some small change 
at least into mine. Poor man, he knew nothing 
of fresh-run salmon, of beautiful rivers and 
pools and woods, of the exhilaration of the long 
walk, of taking a hand at poling the canoe up 

the rapids, or of the delight of a day well spent 

37 



A CLUB 

and of floating down-stream with that canoe not 
filled with fish, but with one or two worth while 
— ^back to the camp to swap stories with your 
messmates, of the big salmon that rose once but 
would never rise again, and of the one that 
really got away through no fault of the man 
behind the rod. Why, this client of mine 
seemed to think all this would wait for me, and 
that bright salmon could be killed with as com- 
plete a disregard of season as cold-storage mar- 
ket salmon could be bought. I sought to make 
it clear to him that one of my partners would 
serve him just as well. The wily client replied 
in his most brazen, flattering way that for me 
there was no substitute. Nevertheless I was 
cajolery-proof. I had, however, to use all my 
arts of persuasion — ^for there was before me the 
warning that a lawyer pleading his own cause 
has a fool for a client. So I tried my hand at 
painting a picture for him, in order to secure his 
cordial assent to my going — ^though I should 
have gone, believe me, whether or no. I told 
him of fishing, not merely when the sun was 
well up in the heavens, but of another kind 
when the daylight is ebbing away into that, 
which with us would be a rapidly diminishing 

38 



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twilight and then night, but which on a salmon- 
river is often but the occasion for the oncoming 
flood of a wondrous, prolonged afterglow from 
the west, and the streaming in of a majestic 
light from the north; and when, too, the birds 
are all out as if for a prize-song festival. For 
the hermit-thrush is there with that plaintive, 
emotional, soul-stirring note which only he and 
his half-brother, the wood-thrush, and his dimin- 
utive second cousin, the veery — each of whom 
is there as well — can ever sing. So, too, is 
the white-throated sparrow — the Peabody bird 
for some classifications, but the nightingale of 
the canoemen, and justly so called by them 
since almost invariably he repeats his gentle, 
restful notes at midnight. Then, most wonder- 
ful of all, the tiny winter wren — which the 
writers of bird-books know so little of, or at 
least write so unappreciatively of — begins his 
magician's song — which in its wild careering, 
profligate notes is not merely an outburst of 

melody but No, I forego any attempt at 

description of my own, but quote you the 
comment, or rather protest, of a graceful 
writer over an inadequate reference to this 

wren. 

$9 



A CLUB 

This is Nuttall's description: 

The wren has a pleasing warble, much louder than 
might be expected from its diminutive size. Its song 
likewise continues more or less throughout the year 
— even during the prevalence of a snow-storm it has 
been heard as cheerful as ever. It likewise con- 
tinues its note till very late in the evening, though 
not after dark. 

This is the protest of the commentator, Mr. 
Montague Chamberlain: 

Had Nuttall ever met with the winter wren in its 
summer haunts; had he ever heard its wild melody 
break the stillness of the bird's forest home, or know 
of the power controlled by that tiny throttle, and 
of its capacity for brilliant execution; had he but 
once listened to its sweet and impassioned tones and 
the suggestive joyousness of its rapid thrills; had 
Nuttall, in short, ever heard the bird sing — ^he could 
not, surely, have damned it with such faint praise. 
The song of this wren is not well known; for the 
bird seldom sings beyond the nesting season, and 
then is rarely heard away from the woodland groves. 
But once heard the song is not soon forgotten; it 
is so wild and sweet a lay, and is flung upon the 
woodland quiet with such energy, such hilarious 
abandon, that it compels attention. Its merits en- 
title it to rank among the best of our sylvan songsters. 

I told my client Midas, of casting for salmon 
amid such light and such sounds in the waters 
of a pool reflecting as in a magic mirror all the 
wealth of glorious color in the heavens, and of 

40 



A CLUB 

the rise of a big fish to the fly, and of the added 
music of the high reel-note as he makes his 
first big run. Yes, you and he did hear me 
aright; it was the music of the reel. If you still 
insist that it was a discord, I shall have no 
dispute with you, but retort that out of dis- 
cords Wagner wrought some of his surpassing 
orchestral harmonies. Then I described to him 
the mighty leap of the fish from the pool and 
the conclusion of the fisherman that every- 
thing animate about himself had at the same 
time left his body; the prolonged matching of 
the wit of man against the wit of the salmon; 
the calling into service sometimes of the pic- 
turesque flambeau; and the final human tri- 
umph with the salmon netted or beached — 
not gaffed, for such butchers' work was long 
since banished there. 

After that persuasive picture, I added up for 
him the other pros and an inconsequential con 
or two something after this fashion: You, my 
client, are not in trouble. No one seeks to 
diminish that big pile of your accumulations; 
you wish merely to add to it. Even suppose 
you are correct in thinking I alone can best 
serve you. Why should I, if by so doing I be 

4 41 



A CLUB 

obliged to substitute the unprofitable fee for 
some of the Joy of life, who has a disposition 
not to come your way again, if you do not 
always keep the door of your being flung wide 
open for her to enter? Or to change the figure 
of speech, Joy will cease with her warnings, if 
like Felix of old you answer too often, " Go thy 
way for this time; when I have a convenient 
season I will call for thee." 

I added that gray hairs and a grandchild were 
my memento maris > and my advance information 
that the season was not so far off, when I should 
cast no fly in any waters. When that day had 
come and the newspapers had informed him I 
should never again be adviser or advocate for 
anyone, I suggested that perhaps he might be 
disposed to say to himself, " Well, sorry enough 
am I that an important business engagement 
makes it impossible for me to hear the last word 
said concerning my counsel and the last hymn 
sung in his behalf, for he was a good kind of a 
fellow." Whereupon I made two proposals to 
him: that he consent that I go without irritation 
on his part, and that neither of us permit any 
engagement to interfere with attendance at that 
last oflSce for the one, to whom the night had 

42 



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come and whose work was over. The sequel 
was that the chent agreed to wait; later his 
project was successfully carried out, and mean- 
while he received a fine specimen of the king 
of fish from the waters I went to. And one of 
us is assured of the presence of the other, on 
that final day when ashes shall be given to 
ashes and dust to dust. 

Before we end our talk of fishing and get to 
your enjoyment of the sport, let me play the 
philosopher and suggest how often in trait and 
gullibility men are like unto fish. 

At times when the sun is in mid-heaven the 
salmon seems proof against all the wiles of the 
fisherman, and never so much as wag of head 
or tail will there be for encouragement, though 
in turn all somber fiies — ^Black Dose, Night 
Hawk, or what you will — ^be tried. There lies 
the motionless salmon in his favored pool. 
Then the gaudiest, biggest Silver Doctor will 
bring the rush, the rise and the prey. 

Bret Harte in his inimitable way tells how 
some men are to be taken. Fortunately the 
scene of the story is not laid in New York. 
Otherwise my sense of fair dealing and courtesy 
and perhaps compassion would forbid my adding 

43 



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a further reason (quite as convincing though 
as some of the other silly reasons given) why the 
doors of our poor old battered Stock Exchange 
should be boarded up for good and all. For the 
broker of whom the story is told was a wicked 
man and gave away dangerous secrets to the 
Devil. This Devil was once fishing from the 
roof of a church in Sacramento for victims in the 
street below, but with indifferent success. In 
return for all the untiring efforts which only a 
devil can make, his sole catch was a broker, 
who thereupon twitted the Devil of unskilful- 
ness, while boasting of his own cunning. Finally 
the bargain was struck that the broker was to 
take a hand at the fishing, and the Devil go 
down into the street. I should like to think 
that this broker was a kindly soul and did not 
wish the Devil to get possession of any new 
secrets as against men, who, heaven knows, 
even under most favorable conditions have a 
perilous time with life and devils. Alas, it was 
no charitable thought of that broker which 
imposed the condition that the Devil go down 
into the street, but merely, as you will learn, the 
vanity to make his own triumph and the Devil's 
discomfiture come full circle. 

44 



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Thereupon the broker fished alone, and victim 
after victim was stretched upon the roof until 
mirahle dictu — and here is uncovered the reason 
for that proviso about the enforced descent of 
the Devil — up came the Devil himself at the end 
of the line. I forget whether it is recorded that the 
Devil blushed. Doubtless he prayed — or had re- 
course to something which with devils corresponds 
to prayer — that the broker tell him the name of 
the irresistible fly. The broker was inconsiderate 
enough to disclose the secret, and ever since the 
Devil has understood more than before about fish- 
ing for men; for he learned that it was the " Wild- 
cat" fly which had done such deadly execution. 

As there is a sprinkling of brokers among the 
members here, perhaps it would be prudent for 
me to add — lest it be thought I am seeking to 
establish a monopoly of wickedness in their class 
— that in popular estimation the Devil would 
not carry on such a thriving business, did he 
not now and then replenish his old shop-worn 
goods, with a fresh stock from the manufactur- 
ing plant of the lawyer as well as the broker. 

The men of this Club — whom by the way I 

am picturing to you in my rambling talk, oftener 

45 



A CLUB 

than you realize — ^have long understood all this 
which I was at such pains to detail to my client. 
They are not sacrificing the days and years of 
their lives to the end that they may become 
either misers or spendthrifts of the possessions 
they have heaped up. It should occasion no 
surprise therefore, when you see them here, in 
the full possession of strength, having cast off 
in whole or part the burden of pitiless work 
long before it has rounded the shoulders, flat- 
tened the chests, and destroyed the enthusiasm 
for the golden hours of the afternoon and the 
evening of life. Each of them knows what it 
means 

To mix his blood with sunshine and to take 
The winds into his pulses. 

Again I have recourse to Ruskin in his Ad 
Valorem Chapter: 

We need examples of people also leaving Heaven 
to decide whether they are to rise in the world, 
decide for themselves that they will be happy in it, 
and have resolved to seek — ^not greater wealth but 
simpler pleasure; not higher fortune but deeper felic- 
ity, making the first of possessions self-possession. 

Believe me, my friend, these men are as good 
examples as you could find of such even though 
you ransacked the earth. 

46 



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If you would know of their capacity for friend- 
ship, I ask Montaigne — one of my authorities 
for the sin or virtue of rambling, just as your 
point of view is — ^to speak for me, with that 
charm which has made his writings so refresh- 
ing to those that weary of much of the common- 
place in the literary output of to-day. 

In that matchless translation of Florio we 
read: 

As for the rest, those we ordinarily call friends and 
amities, are but acquaintances and familiarities, tied 
together by some occasion or commodities, or means 
whereof our mindes are entertained. In the amitie 
I speak of, they entermixe and confound themselves 
one in the other, with so universall a commixture, 
that they weare out, and can no more finde the 
seme that hath conjoyned them together. If a man 
urged me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feele it 
cannot be expressed, but by answering; Because 
it was he, because it was my selfe. There is beyond 
all my discourse, and besides what I can particularly 
report of it, I know not what inexplicable and fatall 
power, a meane and Mediatrix of this indissoluble 
union. We sought one another, before we had 
seene one another, and by the reports we had heard 
one of another; which wrought a greater violence 
in us, than the reason of reports may well beare: 
I think by some secret ordinance of the heavens, 
we embraced one another by our names. And at 
our first meeting, which was by chance at a great 
feast, and solemne meeting of a whole towneship, 
we found our selves so surprized, so knowne, so 
acquainted, and so combinedly bound together, that 

47 



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from thence forward, nothing was so neere unto us, 
as one unto another. 



Yet neither Shakespeare, nor Montaigne, nor 
Cicero, nor Emerson, nor Horace, nor any of 
the other illustrious men whose voices are im- 
mortal in the world, ever told of a finer, more 
generous, responsive, unselfish manifestation of 
priceless friendship than joins together this band 
of brothers here. 

Do not, therefore, consider all this preliminary- 
talk of mine superfluous. You need, you often 
say, the guide to instruct you as to insects and 
birds and flowers and stars in space. How, 
then, are you justified in rushing to the con- 
clusion that any part of this introduction is 
superfluous.^ You wish to meet these men 
understandingly. Accordingly you ought to be 
interested in advance, in knowing how it is that 
the modern-day miracle is wrought, whereby 
this comradeship has grown up among men of 
divergent tastes and notions and occupations — 
evidenced not by the flabby deposit of one hand 
into another, but by the grip of the hand, the 
hearty, affectionate greeting and embrace, 

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which ordinarily we associate only with the 
effervescence of impulsive youth. 

The fact is that there is this transformation, 
when the threshold of these inviting rooms is 
crossed, and the engrossing thoughts of the sev- 
eral walks of life — ^from which the members come 
and to which they must necessarily return — are 
shed as a worldly garment not to be paraded or 
even worn here. 

At a public dinner a short time since, I was 
the guest of an old friend — not a snob I should 
explain, lest you misinterpret what he said to 
me. He had had many advantages of birth and 
breeding and education and social environment. 
On the way home in his carriage he communed 
with himself and me, to the effect generally that 
doubtless I was a bit surprised to meet his other 
guests of the evening. "Well," said he, "they 
are with me a good deal nowadays at my 
luncheon club, at my home, at their homes and 
at .^public dinners, though we were not friends 
in boyhood or at the university or in middle age, 
and have not altogether the same point of view 
of life. Yet steadily one by one, my old com- 
panions have gone the way we must all go, and 

49 



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but for these men I should be, as it were, alone 
in the world." Then the thought occurred to 
me: what would have been the satisfaction of 
this man's diminishing life, had the good fortune 
come to him to be one of this company, where 
the greater the age and the more uncertain the 
step, the more loving are the arms of welcome. 
Did you ever hear the old, almost forgotten 
English ballad "The Keys of Heaven" really 
sung? If not, get some one to sing it for you; 
not slur or murder the song but interpret it. Or 
if this be impracticable read it — ^but read even 
such attenuated poetry aloud, as you ought to 
read all poetry, unless trying not to understand 
it. Then realize that the "keys of the heart" 
and not the "keys of Heaven" or the treasures 
of earth, are the way to the companionship of 
" walk and talk," among these men, just as they 
were with the long-hesitating, but ultimately 
wise lady of the song. 

If you are disposed to refer to the tales you 
say you have heard of the merry-making of 
these men, why then I interpose for them the 
demurrer — which with us of the law serves the 
purpose of the colloquial retort of the layman: 

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Well, what of it! There is no court of con- 
science or of good manners or of common sense 
that is entitled to be applauded for condemning 
mirth which — though it may be over-indulged 
in, as it never is here — is in large part born of 
wisdom. For the wisest at times give them- 
selves over to what is playful and frolicsome, 

"Within the limit of becoming mirth." 

Thank Heaven there still live men with such 
good sense allied to moderation, as to be merry. 
Why the very word "merry," as it is under- 
stood by us here, and as it was once understood 
by the world, ill serves for any unfavorable 
comment or reflection upon the doings of such 
men. You do not have to ransack the erudite 
volumes of the etymologists, to learn that 
"merry" was once descriptive of that which 
promoted true pleasure and happiness and 
agreeable diversion, and had to do even with 
religious fervor. Mr. L. Pearsall Smith, in his 
entertaining as well as instructive work on the 
English language, will tell you this. 

Mirth is not a debauch, nor was "Merrie 

England" intended to portray England on a 

spree. 

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If you are disposed to be still more of a word- 
antiquarian, you can learn from the modern 
dictionary, and from Mr. Pearsall, too, that 
"merry" can be traced further back to the 
word which signified "short"; so that what is 
merry is but means to the end of lessening care 
and the dullness of life by good cheer. If as 
you intimate, "merry" has come to have the 
slightly opprobrious significance of excessive 
frivolity, when applied to the doings of full- 
grown men gathered together, it is only because 
the conduct of some others has been beyond 
the border line which discretion ought to pre- 
scribe for its legitimate province. Read Lamb's 
"New Year's Eve" if you would know how even 
a shy, retiring soul can voice for us a bold, un- 
answerable plea for the pleasures of living. 

Have you of late read Sterne's touching dedi- 
cation of Tristam Shandy to INIr. Pitt, whom he 
first addresses as Great Sir, and then as "more 
to his Honour Good Sir?" 

Never poor wight of a Dedicator had less hopes 
from his Dedication than I have from this of mine; 
for it is written in a bye corner of the kingdom and 
in a retir'd thatch'd house, where I live in a constant 
endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health 
and other evils of fife by mirth, being firmly per- 

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suaded that every time a man smiles — but much 
more so when he laughs, it adds something to this 
Fragment of Life. 

How thoroughly this stricken man of genius 
understood the true meaning of mirth! 

How delightful would be the world if we could 
organize humankind into groups, and license to 
stray from the somber path of the conventions 
only those with the capacity and the virtue to 
curb over-indulgence in pleasures, which, as I 
have said, is never witnessed within this group 
of men here. For like other sensible men they 
can make the trivial wager without dipping in- 
to someone else's cash-box for the wherewithal; 
they know the cup that cheers but not the cup 
that inebriates; and they can unbend without 
rolling on the floor. 

How discriminating my licensing bureau 
would be in recognizing that the dangerous 
experiment for one is but a petty offense for 
another. Before consenting to issue its license 
it would take into consideration that, in some 
instances, even the petty offense should not be 
so unbridled as to set an evil example to the 
community at large. My bureau would deter- 
mine which of the statues are to have clothes 

53 



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on, and which are to be seen in their naked 
grace and beauty; which books are to be pub- 
lished in their entirety and which are to have 
expurgated editions; it could determine — ^no, I 
must cut illustrations short, or run the risk of 
being excommunicated by some of the uncom- 
promising, for attempting to turn upside down 
the established social order. 

Yet what a new era of sanity and wisdom such 
a beneficent license bureau would usher in, by 
thus prescribing the ordering of the comings 
and goings of men on the fine principle of con- 
duct of Dr. Johnson — to be abstemious when 
it was impossible to be temperate. Perhaps 
the motto of the bureau might be adapted from 
the quotation Bosworth makes: Refrain if you 
cannot abstain. 

All decently merry men would, of course, 
favor such a bureau. And how could the dull, 
censorious just make their righteousness square 
with a vote against such a reasonable align- 
ment of the parties, as we of the law would say. 
For thereby much happiness would come into 
the world without risk to those not entitled to, 
and therefore not able to get, their license. Let 
us have done with the view that is always yea 

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yea, and nay nay, and by way of variety, now 
and then at least, adopt the view that is rela- 
tive and not absolute. 

Qui vit sans folie n^est fas si sage qu'il croit, 
says La Rochefoucauld. Nor was he any mean 
philosopher, nor as some superficially think, 
merely the cynic. He did not propose, without 
protest, that vice should be permitted to wear 
the livery of virtue, or pretense that of merit, 
or arrogance that of true courtesy. Would that 
more of us looked long and understandingly into 
his mirror, where the wisest attitude toward life 
is so often reflected! 

Shakespeare, to whom we so often have re- 
course for the organic law of common sense, 
sums this controversy up for us all: 

Nor aught so good but strained from that fair use 
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. 

Do you wish a very modern view of the visita- 
tions of the hard-and-fast censor of things finite 
and infinite? The Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table tells how — no, you shall have the inci- 
dent in Oliver Wendell Holmes's own words, 
for it would be literary heresy to attempt to 
paraphrase it: 

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Here is a Kttle poem I sent a short time since to 
a committee for a certain celebration. I under- 
stood that it was to be a festive and convivial occa- 
sion, and ordered myself accordingly. It seems the 
president of the day was what is called a "teeto- 
taler." I received a note from him in the follow- 
ing words, containing the copy subjoined, with the 
emendations annexed to it. 

"Dear Sir, — Your poem gives good satisfaction 
to the committee. The sentiments expressed with 
reference to liquor are not, however, those generally 
entertained by this community. I have therefore 
consulted the clergyman of this place, who has made 
some slight changes, which he thinks will remove all 
objections, and keep the valuable portions of the 
poem. Please to inform me of your charge for said 
poem. Our means are limited, etc., etc., etc. 

"Yours with respect." 



HERE IT IS— WITH SLIGHT ALTERATIONS! 
Come! fill a fresh bumper, — ^for why should we go 

logwood 

While the n c cta? still reddens our cups as they flow! 

decoction 
Pour out the rich juicca still bright with the sun, 

dye-stuflf 
Till o'er the brimmed crystal the rubica shall run. 
half-ripened apples 

The pufplc globed cluato?o their Hfe-dews have bled; 

taste sugar of lead 

How sweet is the breat -b of the f - ragranoo Xhoiy chodj 
rank poisons wineslll 

For summer's laot roooa lie hid in the mn es- 
5 56 



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stable-boys smoking 

That were garnered by maidonc who laughed through 

long-nines. 

the vinoo. 

scowl howl scoflF sneer 

Then a cmilo, and a glaoo; and a toao %-, and a gbeep; 
strychnine and whisky, and ratsbane and beer 
For all the good wino^ and wo'vo eomc of it horol 

In cellar, In pantry, in attic, in hall, 

Down, down, with the tyrant that masters us all! 

Long hvG the gay aorvant that laughc for uo alU 

The company said I had been shabbily treated, 
and advised me to charge the committee double — 
which I did. But as I never got my pay, I don't 
know that it made much difference. I am a very 
particular person about having all I write printed 
as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re- 
revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof recti- 
fied impression of all my productions, especially 
verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An in- 
tentional change of his text murders him. No won- 
der so many poets die young. 

Yes, true enough it is, that few of us can 
tolerate the combined loss of pay and self- 
esteem from any such high-handed proceeding. 
Why even Mrs. Malaprop was aroused to great 
wrath, merely by "aspersions upon her parts of 
speech." 

Just here let me tell you of a conversation I 

5 57 



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once had with Lord Charles Russell, one evening 
while he was in this country. As a barrister 
he had been counsel to the English Jockey 
Club. As Lord Chief Justice he was called 
upon to decide a case in which the Club was 
deeply interested, involving the question wheth- 
er an anti-gambling -house statute prohibited 
the wager on the race -course. He of course 
was under obligation to render a pro forma de- 
cision against the claims of the Club, so that 
the case might be heard before the House of 
Lords on final appeal. Called upon to adopt 
this course, he was much interested in the de- 
cisions of our courts concerning a somewhat 
similar statute of the State of New York. 
I wish some extremists could have listened 
to his commendation of the statute and the 
decisions which declined to order decapitation 
for the simple, inoffensive wager; and also to 
his sane, temperate discussion of the general 
subject of diversion, which so often incurs the 
risk of the ex-cathedra judgment as for hopeless, 
uncondonable guilt. 

A distinguished surgeon of a foreign city some 
time since told me of a remark once made to 
him by Oliver Wendell Holmes — that the bigot, 



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like the pupil of tlie eye, contracts under the 
light. Clever and epigrammatic surely that 
was; and let us hope, despite some rather dis- 
heartening experiences to the contrary, that 
it may come to be true of our day and gener- 
ation. Alas that the gospel of reasonableness 
is preached and practised so sparingly in these 
exacting, strenuous days! 

In short, after much reflection, I am quite 
prepared to insist that the license coming from 
my bureau would, in importance and salutary 
influence, be next to the poetic license — though 
of course in this too prosaic world, the poetic 
license should have the first place of honor. 

Inasmuch, too, as there is the counterfeit as 
well as the genuine poetic license, my bureau 
might in time acquire jurisdiction over the 
granting of even it. Yes, in my Republic or 
Utopia, the poet would have to apply for his 
license by a very convincing petition — not written 
in rhyme or blank verse either, but in wingless 
prose — before securing permission to carry about 
any such dangerous, concealed weapon as the pen. 

If you would have more ancient authority, 
then recall how Ovid, after having said — : If 

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we mount too high we set the heavens aflame; 
and if we descend too low we set the earth 
aflame — adds that which has ever since been 
regarded as typically descriptive of the golden 
mean in life — 

Medio tutissimus ibis 

A beloved partner of mine, Charles Francis 
Stone, with whom I was associated for so 
many years until he went to the reward reserved 
for the elect — a man of infinite humor and 
noble character, whose profound legal learning 
was matched by his general scholarship — said 
to me that a fellow-student of his at Harvard 
once translated these words "The Ibis is safest 
in the middle way." Along with our smile at 
this, should we not pause to consider how 
many there are who, though they avoid any 
such rendering, yet never arrive at the true 
meaning of the phrase, so little do they know of 
life however much they may know of Latin. 

We can learn from Horace that to the great 
men of old, dignity was not necessarily associ- 
ated with what Sheridan aptly terms "An un- 
forgiving eye and a damned disinheriting 

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countenance." For Horace tells in one of his 
Satires how Scipio Africanus and Laelius were 
accustomed, with Lucilius, to make merry 
until the cabbage was well boiled. If one is 
curious as to the special kind of play in which 
they indulged themselves, he will find the infor- 
mation in the note of an ancient commentator, 
which tells how Lucilius ran around the dining 
couch, threatening a blow with the twisted 
napkin. 

Fortunate indeed it is for their peace of mind 
(which is another term for the preservation of 
their conceit), that some of the dyspeptics do 
not indulge in the reading of the ancient, or for 
that matter the modern classics. 

How well Horace, whose wise and kindly face 
looks out so often from the pages of his writings, 
came to know life as he went on in his journey. 
How he evidenced that understanding by many 
an injunction not to be forever on the highways 
of life where the multitude strive and struggle, 
but to frequent, now and then, the places where 
Relaxation so often loiters with Joy for a com- 
panion. What good judgment, and common 
sense and wholesome advice and wisdom are in 
such lines as these: 

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Verum pone Tnoras el studium lucri 
Nigroromque memory dum licet, ignium 
Misce stultitiam condliis brevem 
Dulce est desipere in loco. 

What a sermon it is for all of us, however 
much identified we may be with the world of 
affairs — preached by Horace and practised here 
among these men. 

We are not to lose interest in practical affairs; 
only we are to assign them their proper place in the 
true economy of life; we are not to give over the 
acquisition of possessions, but are to put away from 
us the greed of wealth, and the folly and nonsense 
commended to us are not to be long-continued or 
over-indulged in, but brief, and fitting, as well. And 
all this is to be done while we have the opportunity, 
and are mindful of the consuming fires of the funeral 
pyre. 

If your patience or my time permitted, I 
could reinforce all this by further generous 
selections from the great poets, whom so many 
of us erroneously regard as guilty of extrava- 
gance in expression. I could quote, too, from 
Cicero and a host of others, and if need be, from 
Holy Writ, down to this modern strenuous day 
of exhausting the never-to-be-renewed sources 
of life. We replenish our bank-accounts so that 

we may not overdraw them; we are on the hunt 

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for the good-health nostrum lest we become 
bankrupt in health; but to the springs of the 
emotions and of geniality, we give little heed. 
We relegate to the nursery all such sane adages 
as "All work and no play makes Jack a dull 
boy," and go in on life with the capacity irre- 
trievably gone for the infectious, vigor-pro- 
longing, joy-producing, frolicsome nonsense. 

Why, even the baseball "fan" whose hard, 
unenviable job in life it is to occupy the 
"bleachers," is wiser, for he "stretches at the 
seventh inning." 

The men of this Club have a fairly good 
opinion of themselves, but that is mere pride of 
character, not the petty vanity of an offensive 
conceit. Why should not such men know their 
worth? They have been with and are esteemed 
by their peers whose approval is a certificate of 
good character and good citizenship. No one 
of this Club would feel it to be anything but a 
calamity in his life, if he ceased to be well 
thought of by his fellows here, or lost their 
affectionate regard; and this would surely result 
if the conceit were too pronounced. 

I spoke perhaps too hastily a moment since 
of the conceit of the dyspeptic. Let us not bear 



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too hardly on him or anyone else in this 
matter of conceit; for what would become of 
us if we possessed none of it? If the choice has 
to be between too much conceit or none, my 
vote might perhaps be for the conceit. You 
remember what our old friend the "Autocrat" 
says about it: 

Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks 
of specialized knowledge, are things men are very 
apt to be conceited about. Nature is very wise; 
but for this encouraging principle how many small 
talents and little accomplishments would be neg- 
lected! Talk about conceit as much as you like, 
it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; 
it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable. Say 
rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's 
plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that 
falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When 
one has all his conceit taken out of him, when he 
has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak 
through, and he will fly no more. 

Let me add one other illustration. You see, 
as I promised, how in the main, my talk takes 
on the form of the brief — the assertion and then 
the authority: though sometimes, as one may 
not do at the Bar with the legal principle, I 
assert the right to announce new and unsup- 
ported theories of my philosophy of life. 

Here it is, from George Eliot; 

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Indeed, what mortal is there of us, who would 
find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of 
comparing the picture he presents to himself of his 
own doings, with the picture they make on the 
mental retina of his neighbors? We are poor plants 
buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit; 
alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us 
of that windy self -subsistence ! The very capacity 
for good would go out of us. For, tell the most im- 
passioned orator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or 
his shirt-lap hanging out, and that he is tickling 
people by the oddity of his person, instead of thrilling 
them by the energy of his periods, and you would 
infallibly dry up the spring of his eloquence. That 
is a deep and wide saying, that no miracle can be 
wrought without faith — without the worker's faith 
in himself, as well as the recipient's faith in him. 
And the greater part of the worker's faith in him- 
self is made up of the faith that others believe in him. 

Let me be persuaded that my neighbor Jenkins 
considers me a blockhead, and I shall never shine 
in conversation with him any more. Let me dis- 
cover that the lovely Phoebe thinks my squint in- 
tolerable, and I shall never be able to fix her blandly 
with my disengaged eye again. 

Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left 
to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable — that 
we don't know exactly what our friends think of us 
— ^that the world is not made of looking-glass, to 
show us just the figure we are making, and just 
what is going on behind our backs! By the help of 
dear, friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we 
are charming — and our faces wear a becoming air 
of self-possession; we are able to dream that other 
men admire our talents — and our benignity is un- 
disturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing 
much good — and we do a little, 

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Now let me try my hand (and here you see 
appearing the very conceit I am inveighing 
against) at an illustration. In order that con- 
ceit be tolerable to others and not hopelessly 
demoralizing to ourselves, it ought not to be 
our distinguishing, preponderating trait. It 
should always be an alloy in our make-up, as is 
the alloy in the precious - metal coin, which 
thereby is hardened and toughened, so as to 
withstand the rough handling the world is to 
give it. If, however, there be too abounding 
a conceit for our character - alloy, then the 
parallel would be the spurious, counterfeit coin 
or even the gold brick. 

There is no trace of a crude selfishness in these 
men, as there is no false sentiment or lack of 
candor as they cling tenaciously to their posses- 
sions here. Are they not right in all this? Do 
not the most favored of us ordinarily see the 
companions of youth and school and university 
dropping out of the ranks of the procession, 
without any to close up the gaps? Or if there 
be such, they are but the stranger or the chance 
acquaintance. These men look out from their 
surroundings, at least with equanimity upon 
many a disheartening prospect for the others. 

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For here with their contentment, they perhaps 
involuntarily have a feeling approaching to a 
kind of peace at the contrast. To be convinced 
that such a state of mind often justifiably or at 
least unconsciously results under like conditions, 
you have only to read in the opening of the 
second book of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, of 
a certain kind of pleasurable satisfaction to one 
safe on shore, at beholding the distress of those 
in peril from the violent seas. 

Even though the statement were true that 
these members do not carry into the great out- 
side world the same broad, charitable views they 
entertain while in this miniature world, the fact 
need not necessarily be apologized for as a fault. 
These men know enough of life to enjoy it 
sanely, with an enthusiasm to which only dis- 
cretion sets bounds, and yet have a sympa- 
thetic interest and an active share in giving a 
helping hand to those that seem likely to 
stumble or lose their way in that outside world. 
If you pattern others after such men, have you 
not immeasurably advanced the outposts of 
generosity and kindliness? If, on the other 
hand, you undertake to collect together a body 
of men, whose announced business it is to love 

67 



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mankind indiscriminately, is there not a risk 
that your group will include at least some ques- 
tionable saints and stagy politicians, with here 
and there a very evident hypocrite? 

I attended one evening not so long ago a 
political dinner, at which two speakers now 
occupying high positions in the federal govern- 
ment, asserted that the true rule of life was the 
desire to love and be loved by our fellow-men. 
I was convinced then as I am now, that some- 
thing more is needed to assure our safety on 
the voyage we all are making, than any such 
cheering "All's Well " from the Lookout. I was 
convinced then as I am now that we must, in 
addition, insist upon chart and compass, and at 
least appliances for dead reckoning if we are to 
be denied those requisite for the observation. 
There are abroad in the modern-day world with 
all its finer progress, many new-fangled notions 
of political rights and duties that are conspicu- 
ously false. One having the courage to announce 
his lack of sympathy with such notions invites 
denunciation from the spawners of them — and 
generally gets his invitation accepted with pleas- 
ure and promptness. The condition of being 
loved by such men is that we agree with them. 

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How would it do to change somewhat any 
such besetting ambition — to be loved by all our 
fellow-men — to a rule of conduct which shall 
have for its first and fundamental prompting 
the performance of duty as it presents itself, 
and acquiescence in only worthy ideas — so that 
there shall be for us the resulting self-respect? 
Let the approval of the multitude and the 
majority follow if it will; but let us gain our own 
approval first, and have the mirror into which 
we look give back the reflection of nothing, 
the genuineness of which we are in any wise 
doubtful about. 

We have to wait a long time in the world for 
correct information; and until the revision of the 
Scriptures, none but biblical scholars knew that 
the writer of Proverbs had said: "He that 
maketh many friends doeth it to his own de- 
struction." And Hamlet said: Not many 
friends, but those friends thou hast, and their 
adoption tried (and these can never be many), 
grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. 

"But do not dull thy palm with entertainment 
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade." 

Let me add that the distinguishing traits of 
sanity, kindliness, gentleness, fine courage and 

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manly spirit, and last but not least the reason- 
able conservatism of many a member of this 
Club, and their wholesome contempt for the 
charlatan (though for the moment he may have 
usurped the judgment seat) enable them to keep 
step in the ranks of advancing citizenship. And 
these men do this better than many others that 
are disposed to be rather noisy about their ac- 
complishments. 

How refreshing it is to meet a body of men 
such as you see here with temperate, well- 
seasoned, progressively conservative and con- 
servatively progressive opinions to express — 
men of years and wisdom, but not aged! 

For the thought of Swift is the thought of all 
of us: "Every man desires to live long; but no 
man would be old." If we reckon life by mere 
lapse of years, perhaps the majority here are 
well along in their journey, with but a slight 
admixture of the few young men, who for good 
and sufficient reasons have been permitted to 
join this family of their seniors. 

The truth is that in no such Club as this 

should the young man be monarch; because if 

life is to be progressive as to pleasure as well 

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as duty, there should always be the fuller 
enjoyment for youth to look forward to. And 
most things in life are an anti-climax to the 
gratification from companionship with a group 
of men like these. 

It is sometimes a question in the minds of 
those of mature years, whether our present-day 
methods with the youngster are the best for 
his true rearing. To give him too early in life 
a salmon-rod, or to introduce him to an experi- 
ence which can better come to him when quali- 
fied by years and observation for its full appre- 
ciation, is to promote the development of that 
depressing sight — the blase youth. 

After a fashion, it is like the unwisdom of 

handing over to the immature French child 

La Fontaine's Fables to be learned by rote. 

For what can it be expected to fathom of the 

depth of his insight into life, the gentle satire 

and the satisfying, refreshing philosophy which 

he has put into such masterpieces as "Les 

Animaux Malades de la Peste" and "Les deux 

Pigeons ".f^ Of the significance of "La Chene et 

la Roseau," the child would have about as much 

real understanding, as of the Ode of Horace 

which tells how the great pine is so often swept 

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by the tempest and the loftiest towers fall. 
The failure when young to know the worth of 
such masterpieces, may mean a failure also to 
know their worth when the child has become 
man; for with the re-reading in after years, 
the childish interpretation is imperceptibly re- 
vived, so as to interfere with an adequate ap- 
preciation of the genius of La Fontaine. Per- 
haps it is for this reason that the subtle charm 
of his creations is often more apparent to for- 
eigners than to his countrymen. 

By no means do I consider it a misfortune 
without its distinct compensation, that some of 
us here long ago parted company with our teens. 

While we are upon this subject of education 
perhaps I ought — ^for the benefit of yourself and 
all other unfortunates who do not know it — to 
add the following anecdote as to the training of 
the young girl. At a convention of masters of 
schools for girls, where one of the chief subjects 
for discussion was the wisest plan of education, 
some maintained that the romantic side of the 
girl was to be ministered to; others, that pro- 
saic, matter-of-fact instruction should have 
the first place. 

It was the good fortune of the convention to 

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have present a distinguished teacher, who ad- 
vised the middle course, urging that the dis- 
position of the girl should be influential if not 
controlling as to the appropriate form of 
training. The too romantic girl was not to be 
over-fed with figures of rhetoric, nor was the 
starved fancy of another girl to be deprived of 
the poetic prescription and stimulus. He was 
not required to argue his case ad nauseam, for 
an incident in his own experience was con- 
vincing. It seems that there was in his well- 
known school a scholar with the fanciful, almost 
fantastic bent of mind. In the class of my- 
thology, when asked Who was Ganymede: she 
gave the rather original answer that he was the 
offspring of Olympus and an eagle. The startled 
examiner protested at any such unrecorded 
origin, and insisted that the mountain had had 
no part in the birth of this love-child. He even 
went so far as to explain, that it was impossible 
for a mountain to make any contribution to 
progeny. This latter assertion of course was 
a little too sweeping, for we all know that the 
pregnant mountain once gave birth to the 
ridiculus mus. No one, however, had ever be- 
fore gone to the length of claiming that a moun- 
6 73 



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tain had at any time been the cause of travail 
in another — even in the promiscuous love- 
making of those ancient days, when the world 
was young and marriage-license bureaus few. 

Nevertheless the young lady stood her 
ground, and, still insisting that Ganymede was 
the offspring of Olympus and an eagle, ap- 
pealed from the decision of the Chair to her 
text-book, from which she read with wrapt 
expression and heavenward-cast eye, how it 
had all happened: "And an eagle bore Gany- 
mede to Olympus." 

The comment of this distinguished teacher to 
those present was that nothing was found to be 
so efficacious for her ailment as liberal, fre- 
quently repeated, good, old-fashioned doses of 
mathematics. 

Returning now from our digression, let me 
repeat that there are really no old men here. 
A goodly number have toiled or run, as the case 
may have been, to the top of the hill and are 
now on their way toward the foot, and there 
are, of course, the lengthening shadows as the 
sun goes down; but these men are not old. 
They are really young fellows in thought and 

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spirit and deed. On the wrong side of the hill, 
think you? No, you are mistaken again. For 
on the side of the hill where they are, may be 
seen the wide prospects, the extended horizon, 
the glory of the slowly, gently approaching 
sunset and the company of those who make 
life really worth the living. 

Would you tolerate the recalling of the rather 
hackneyed lines: 

Grow old along with me: 

The best is yet to be 

The last of life for which the first was made. 

Let me add something that has not been called 
upon to do such yeoman's service in quotation — ■ 
the concluding Henley poem from Stevenson's 
masterpiece, "A Christmas Sermon": 

A late lark twitters in the quiet skies; 

And from the west, 

Where the sun, his day's work ended. 

Lingers as in content. 

There falls on the old, gray city 

An influence luminous and serene, 

A shining peace. 

The smoke ascends 

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 
Shine, and are changed. In the valley 
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun. 
Closing his benediction, 

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Sinks, and the darkening air 

Thrills with a sense of triumphing night — 

Night, with her train of stars 

And her great gift of sleep. 

So be my passing! 

My task accomplished and the long day done. 

My wages taken, and in my heart 

Some late lark singing. 

Let me be gathered to the quiet west. 

The sundown splendid and serene. 



"Death" writes Henley as his final word, 
which I have omitted, and in place of which I 
shall have the printer insert asterisks — if ever 
I summon up the courage to risk the disapproval 
of the writing guild, with its "closed shop" 
prejudices. 

For such an end is surely not death, but 
an inspiration, and a new membership in the 
"Choir Invisible." What a fine spirit there is 
in those lines; and how was it possible for the 
man who had the greatness to write them, to 
be so inconsiderate as he was in thought and 
speech to the memory of Stevenson? Never- 
theless, as there is so often the apology for the 
ungracious act, let us assign the cause to the 
pain, which was so much of Henley's portion 
in life, and let us have no quarrel with those 

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who are now seeking to dedicate to him a 
fitting memorial. Let us all, now and then at 
least, stand up to say a word for those whom 
we are not hastily to condemn in the court of 
public opinion, wherefrom there is so seldom a 
satisfactory appeal. 

The whole of "A Christian Sermon" is in its 
way on as high a level as the Henley Poem, as 
Stevenson writes the obituary for his fellows, 
all of whom are in his conception failures. At 
best they are to be grouped into the faithful 
and the unfaithful failures, though for the faith- 
ful failure there is to be the sure reward: 

Give him a march with his old bones. There out 
of the glorious, sun-colored earth, out of the day and 
the dust and the ecstasy, there goes another faith- 
ful failure. 

What a frank, but at the same time a gener- 
ous, comforting epitaph for us all! 

Yet how often do men write a poor, vain 
record on the tombstones they erect, as in the 
lives they lead! 

In days gone when the humorist of the Bur- 
lington Hawkeye had his well-established vogue, 
he told how the epitaph concerning a beloved 
wife also testified to the fact that the loving 

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husband of this beloved wife owned and edited 
an interesting newspaper, the annual subscrip- 
tion for which was but a few dollars; and to the 
further fact that the editor could be interviewed 
without difficulty, if the reader chose to mount 
a few flights of stairs and knock on the door of 
the sanctum. 

Then sometimes, as in the acts of life, we 
leave in epitaphs the record open to misinterpre- 
tation. One of my partners tells me, that in a 
cemetery near the campus of Cornell University 
there are in line three gravestones, each one 

erected to the memory of a beloved wife of . 

Two are modest enough, barely rising a few 
inches out of the earth, while the remaining one 
towering up high above them and other neigh- 
boring tombstones, bears the explanation, "Or- 
dered by herself." Whether the inscription is 
intended to bear witness to the husband's con- 
sideration for the two wives by featuring the 
vanity of the other, or whether he was merely 
a thoughtless, bereaved satirist, future genera- 
tions are left in doubt not to be easily re- 
solved. 

Nor is the meaning quite clear of the inscrip- 
tion I have seen on the walls of Lady Chapel, 

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in Ely Cathedral, to the memory of one Robert 
Lightfoot, Collector of the Land Tax for the 
County of Cambridge. The tablet, which is in 
memory too of his wife and his son, recites 
neither their virtues nor their faults, but only 
the dates of their birth and death, with this 
concluding comment, "Of what sort the above 
ment'd persons were, the last day will discover." 
Even the Curate there was not without mis- 
givings that the mortuary cynic may have 
intended to intimate that someone of the 
members of the family may have been not 
less light-fingered than Light of Foot. 

Of the over-featuring of ourselves in the epi- 
taphs some write for others, let me give you as 
good an illustration as you are likely to come 
across in many a day. 

As a youth I attended a church in my native 
town, where one could hear impassioned ser- 
mons by truly great preachers — ^though one of 
them once suggested that not piety, but the 
expectation of subsequent aid in deciphering for 
me the meaning of Greek and Latin texts, had 
more or less to do with my being of the con- 
gregation. In the churchyard there a monu- 
ment can be seen, ostensibly erected to the 

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memory of the unfortunate victims of the ship- 
wrecked barks, the Bristol and the Mexico, 
But it is not, as you will hear, altogether dis- 
regardful of the virtues of those responsible for 
its erection and for the purchase of the meager 
plot on which it stands. 

The monument is not an impressive one and 
a very small sum must have represented its 
cost. As for the land, the inscription is at 
pains to recite its limited dimensions (30 x 
161 feet); though in some way or other not 
quite clear, 150 bodies were enabled to find a 
resting-place there and yet leave enough un- 
occupied ground remaining, to justify its being 
set apart for further use as a Mariners' Bury- 

ING-GROUND. 

Here are the modest inscriptions. On one 
side is this: 

THE INHABITANTS OF THE COUNTY, 

IMPELLED BY A GENEROUS SENSIBILITY, 

HAVE PURCHASED THIRTY FEET FRONT 

BY 161 FEET DEEP OF THIS YARD, 

AND SET IT APART EXCLUSIVELY AS 

A mariners' BURYING-GROUND. 

On the other side this: 



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to commemorate the melancholy fate 

of the unfortunate sufferers belonging 

to the bristol and mexico, this 

monument was erected partly by the 

money found upon their persons and 

partly by the contributions of the 

benevolent and humane in the county of 

Queens. 

If you are on the lookout for precision of 
statement, you should not fail to notice how 
discriminating this language is. For, though 
the riflers of the carcasses were "benevolent and 
humane," they laid no claim to a generous 
sensibility which was reserved for the providers 
of the burial-plot. Yet both classes to their 
credit be it said, were sufficiently generous to 
give the local poet his opportunity which he 
seized upon in this fashion: 

What lo, alas, beneath this monument doth (sic) 

sleep. 
The bodies of those that had crossed the deep. 
But instead of being landed safe on shore, 
On a cold and frosty morning, they all were 

NO more. 

If you would like to have ocular proof of this 
which borders on the incredible, we can pause 

n 



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as on our way home we pass the church or 
rather the site of the church. For fire has twice 
carried it off — some irreverent ones assert, 
through spontaneous combustion of accumu- 
lated hell - fire - and - brimstone deliverances of 
the preachers and laymen of days gone by. 

What a gruesome story of the misconceived 
words of the tombstone inscription, is De 
Maupassant's "La Morte." 

The mistress dies alas, with a destroying 
cough, and inconsolable over her loss the lover 
wanders off into the world. The homing in- 
stinct seizes him and he comes back one day 
to his old dust-covered rooms, left just as they 
were when tenanted by the two care -free 
occupants. 

The thought possesses him to visit her grave 
and see again the tombstone for which he had 
provided the epitaph. After a view of the 
grave he determines to sleep that night within 
the city of the dead and with her grave for a 
couch. So eluding the vigilance of the ceme- 
tery guardian, he wanders back out of view as 
the day dies. Then the gates are shut, and he 
is free to return unobserved. But the night 
has come on quickly and he unfortunately hag 

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lost his way. Thereupon, horrible to behold, 
the earth begins to tremble sufficiently to break 
open the receptacles in which the dead are; 
and out of the graves come the skeletons one 
by one. There is a purpose, too, in their com- 
ing — ^for each of the skeletons begins work and 
with the obliterating stone is removing the false 
epitaph, and making ready a new surface where- 
on is to be carved the truth. One, Jacques 
Olivant, is at work on his epitaph, which tells 
of the age at which he died, of his upright- 
ness and how he loved his kind and died in the 
faith of the Lord. The only part of it which 
survives is the record of his age. The new 
words disclose that by his cruelty he had hast- 
ened the death of his father whose property he 
wished to inherit, had tortured his wife, torment- 
ed his children, been treacherous to his neigh- 
bors and when the opportunity offered had been 
a thief as well. And so the good work goes on. 
The wanderings of the lover bring him at 
last to the tomb of his mistress where she, too, 
is busy with the substitution of truth for fic- 
tion; and in place of the lover's epitaph 

"Elle aima, fut aimee, et mourut" 

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she is carving with her bony digit the story of 
her unfaithfulness and the cause of her death. 

"EtANT sortie UN JOUR TROMPER SON AMANT, 
ELLE EUT FROID SOUS LA PLUIE, ET MOURUT." 

No wonder the poor, disillusioned devil was 
found in the morning unconscious near her tomb. 
If time and your patience served, I might tell 
you of the pretentious tomb and effigy in St. 
Saviour's Church, of the famous charlatan Dr. 
Lockyer whose long epitaph records his virtues 
and his pills. And though in the lines his 
"virtues" are put first, and his "pills" second, 
his virtues are written in small letters but his 
PILLS thus. 

Yes, unquestionably you are prepared to say 
enough "of graves, of worms and epitaphs." 
Perhaps you are right in this; but bear with me 
until I have recited to you the Requiem of Ste- 
venson: 

Under the wide and starry sky. 
Dig the grave and let me lie, 
Glad did I live and gladly die 
And I laid me down with a will; 

This be the verse you grave for me. 
Here he lies where he longed to be. 
Home is the sailor, home from sea. 
And the hunter home from the hill. 



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One cannot, as he reads such lines or better 
still hears them sung to their fine Homer- 
music setting, think of death only as the cruel, 
implacable messenger of the fates, particularly 
if the end come when one is ready for the 
journey and has truly lived his life. Yes, 
surely this is so, though that life be but half 
over, if some part of it shall have been spent 
in ministering even in slight measure to the 
other fellow that has happened for the moment 
to be out of luck with fate. 

Even if all this disconnected talk may have 
unduly taxed your good-nature, you need not 
consider yourself the only person since the 
beginning of time that has had to exercise 
patience under the afflictions of the world — one 
of the worst of which I am prepared to con- 
cede is the endless talker. You must bear in 
mind, too, that I have had an endless subject, 
in attempting to describe to you a world in 
itself small though it be. So have the kind of 
patience Sir Henry Hawkins says he was 
called upon to manifest, while sitting on the 
Bench to which he had been elevated as Lord 
Brampton: 

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The art of advocacy was being exercised between 
an Irishman and a Scotchman, which made the 
EngUsh language quite a hotchpotch of equivocal 
v/ords and a babel of sounds. The butcher's slander 
was one that seemed to shake the very foundations 
of butcherdom throughout the world, namely, an 
insinuation that the plaintiff had sold Australian 
mutton for Scotch beef — on the face of it an ex- 
traordinary allegation, although it had to find its 
way through the interpretation of a jury as to its 
meaning. 

Amidst this international wrangle the judge kept 
his temper, occasionally when the combatants 
flagged a little for want of breath, cheering them on 
by saying in an interrogative tone, "yes.'*" and in 
the meanwhile writing the following on a sHp of 
paper which he handed to a friend: 

Great Prize Competition for Patience. 
Hawkins First Prize. 

Job Honourable mention. 

Be assured there will be a consolation prize 
for you as well when you are permitted really 
to know the men and the things here. 

Still you must remember how much time we 
have necessarily consumed in our journeyings. 
We have been all the way to the streets of Rome 
where Horace gathered much of the material 
for his Satires, and to his Sabine Farm where 
he was the genial philosopher and spokesman 
for sensible men of all ages; and so down along 
the way until we have reached the world of 

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to-day. We have fallen in with some great 
people, who, though they never heard the name 
of this Club, nevertheless, unconsciously wrote 
much about it both in verse and prose. 

Now that I think of it, we might in our 
wanderings have been benefited by stopping 
awhile to recall the beginning of one of the 
chapters of George Eliot, as she teaches us 
how we are to measure the time and effort of 
life aright: 

Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure 
of things; and the length of the sun's journeying 
can no more tell us how far life has advanced than 
the acreage of a field can tell us what growths can 
be active within it. A man may go south, and, 
stumbling over a bone, may meditate upon it till he 
has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or 
eastward, and discover a new key to language telling 
a new story of races; or he may head an expedition 
that opens new continental pathways, get himself 
maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic poem 
of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few 
months he may come back to find his neighbors 
grumbling at the same parish grievance as before, 
or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the 
pavement in discourse with himself, shaking his 
head after the same percussive butcher's boy, and 
pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same 
prints. If the swiftest thinking has about the pace 
of a greyhound, the slowest must be supposed to 
move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which 
after a good while is discerned to be a slight pro- 

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gression. Such differences are manifest in the 
variable intensity which we call human experience, 
from the revolutionary rush of change which makes 
a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence 
of the familiar, which has no other epochs than those 
of hunger and the heavens. 

Suppose now we change the dramatis personoe. 
No, not necessarily that, but merely change the 
activity of the groups, and another paragraph 
of equal interest can be written. Have the 
stay-at-home the same. Only this time let the 
other go in search of the higher joys of life such 
as are to be found within the magic circle which 
comradeship draws about her true worshipers. 
And, believe me or not as you will, the con- 
trast between the doings of the two, would then 
be as well defined, as it was rightly represented 
to be, — when one of them went forth and 
wrought great things in the world, while a 
plodding routine was the occupation of the 
other. 

Let me hope that you have not fretted over- 
much about all this preliminary, rambling chat, 
except for the reason, perhaps, that you have 
done little of the talking. But really the going 
out with rod and fly and creel, you are looking 
forward to, is not all there is to fishing, which 

88 



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has to do quite as much with the breeze and 
the sunshine, the wild flowers and birds, with the 
canopy of the blue sky and, last but not least, 
with the human companionship. The mere get- 
ting of fish — why the fish-market is the place 
for that kind of fishing with the silver hook! 

Only if we understand all this and strive to be 
like the "towardly scholar" of Isaac Walton, 
shall we begin to understand the meaning of all 
his adopted phrases — "that angling is a rest to 
the mind, a cheerer of the spirits, a diverter of 
sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moder- 
ator of passions, a procurer of contentedness, and 
a begetter of the habits of peace and contented- 
ness." What a wealth of speech all this is, and 
how it laughs at rivalry in expression to one 
that knows the glory of the stream wherein 
trout are to be taken! 

So, in this spirit let us start, not for the 
ponds where there are fish in abundance to be 
had for the asking, but for the old Connetquot 
River, the brook of inspiration. Then I am 
sure you will in the end agree with me that 
if Walton could be moved to such utterance over 
the Itchen and like prosaic rivers, it would have 
been possible for him to write a still greater 

7 89 



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classic, had his musings been about the stream 
and the sights and the men you are to be 
privileged to see. 

It is rather a long distance we have to go, 
but let us make the trip afoot. It will be worth 
while, even though we shall not have much 
opportunity to pause on our way at the sight 
of the wild flowers which grow in such luxuriance 
here, or at the sound of the songsters, as, with 
the cup of thanksgiving full to overflowing, they 
pledge you their merry toasts. It will be 
enough for you to get a glimpse of the prospect, 
as we go for miles through these pine-covered 
walks, varied now and then by the drumming 
and rush of the partridge, the swift flight of the 
mallard and the black duck, and the interested 
inspection of you by the deer as they roam at 
will over these thousands of acres with their 
sunlit, shadow-lit paths. There will be oppor- 
tunity a-plenty for you to see good examples in 
detail of all this loveliness when you meet it at 
close range as we wade the brook — before we 
fish, and while we fish, and after we fish. 

Let us then, as we set forth, agree with Emer- 
son: "Give me health and a day and I will 
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous"; for 



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never were fishermen blessed with better health 
of body or spirit, or a finer day than we for this 
outing — pilgrimage I should venture to say if 
your enthusiasm were at all like mine. And 
doubtless Lamb in his "Grace before meat" 
speaks for you as well as he does for me when 
he says, "I wish we had at hand a form of grace 
for setting out on an inviting journey." 

There is compensation for most of the vexa- 
tious things of life. And now your reward — 
in the walk before you to the headwaters of this 
brook of brooks and your joy in wading it — is 
to come for having been willing to put up with 
my monopolistic conduct, against which, for- 
tunately for me, you could invoke no restrain- 
ing statute. In order, however, to be free of 
impedimenta (rod, creel, and what not), let us 
take along with us one of the boatmen — no 
ordinary boatman this, but guide, friend and 
philosopher as well. With a knowledge which 
will persuade you that you are all but blind 
he will point out some of the mystery of the 
woods and streams, and the devious ways of 
the game he traps. He will be a real com- 
panion believe me. Though some of his 
language may be classified as profane, and 

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some of it not any more intended for introduc- 
tion into the drawing-room than are cowhide 
boots that have just made a visit to an Augean 
Stable, why what of it all, say I his advocate! 
Heaven be praised, that now and then something 
of an approach to plain speech in the calling 
of the spade the spade, goes to make up the 
language of men. At the worst these non- 
drawing-room words of his are classic; and 
again, lawyer-like I ask you to accept nothing 
on my unsupported assertion, but refer you to 
some of the unrestrained, and rather markedly 
primitive expressions of Rabelais and Sterne. 

As to that portion of his speech which 
superficially might be considered profane, I am 
prepared to admit that under provocation it 
might, for aught I know, be as picturesque as 
was the language of Bret Harte's Vulgar Little 
Boy whose sensibilities the driver overlooked. 

He was playing in the street, and the driver of a 
passing vehicle cut at him sportively, with his whip. 
The vulgar little boy rose to his feet and hurled after 
his tormentor a single sentence of invective. I re- 
frain from repeating it, for I feel that I could not do 
justice to it here. If I remember rightly it conveyed, 
in a very few words, a reflection on the legitimacy of 
the driver's birth; it hinted a suspicion of his father's 
integrity, and impugned the fair fame of his mother, 

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it suggested incompetency in his present position, 
personal uncleanliness, and evinced a skeptical 
doubt of his future salvation. 

Perhaps this is not a very appropriate illus- 
tration, since no driver would ever dare cut at 
our boatman with a whip. Still I must admit 
he makes very few by "jiminy" oaths. Castor 
and Pollux mythology not being in his reper- 
tory. Nevertheless his sterling worth has con- 
vinced me — that the blush of the avenging 
spirit as it flies to heaven with his oaths, and 
the tear of the recording angel as they are 
written down, make it all but certain that the 
unreligious words of this man will as surely 
be blotted out forever, as was the "By God" 
of Uncle Toby. 

So you can see I have many defenses for my 
client. Naturally enough, for if, like those of 
my profession, you were now and then free to 
delve as an antiquary into its old procedure, 
you would readily see that the defenses I inter- 
pose for my friend are directness and simplicity 
— compared with the twists and turnings of an 
old-time pleader. For he was permitted to go 
so far now and then in the defense of one charged 

with the appropriation of the illustrative ket- 

P3 



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tie, as to insist that his client had never had it; 
that it was cracked when he got it, and more- 
over that he had returned it. 

Now in our long but stimulating walk, we 
have come to the house of our guide on the 
borders of the upper reaches of this stream, in 
which we are to fish and in which he, in a sense, 
lives; for rarely the day goes by when, as part 
of his duties as guardian or for his own pleas- 
ure, he does not wade it. Before we begin with 
the fly, suppose we sit on this string-piece and 
fill a pipe and rest a bit after our long tramp, so 
that we shall be the better prepared to see some 
things and hear some voices about us which 
otherwise might escape our notice. 

Really it was worth while to have waited and 
not made the dangerous experiment of smoking 
in these woods, so eager always to burst into 
the disastrous blaze. Not only have we thus 
given the woods a fair chance, but we have 
made our appetite keener for the pipe now. 
Strange it is how many of us — and I am quite 
prepared without any searching cross-examina- 
tion to own up to transgression in tobacco, if 
you will let the witness go with this confession 

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— so often permit a great pleasure to grow into 
a perfunctory and unappreciated habit. You 
recall, I am sure, what Burton, in his Anatomy 
of Melancholy, says about tobacco, and recog- 
nize how forcible an illustration it is of what 
we have been saying of use and abuse, of tem- 
perance and of over-indulgence. 

Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco,' 
which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable 
gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy 
to all 'diseases. A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous 
herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and 
medicinally used, but as it is commonly abused by 
most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a 
plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, 
health, hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the 
ruin and overthrow of body and soul. 

Southey, too, in his colloquies on society has 
his Mask, Montesinos, and the ghostly Sir 
Thomas More discourse of tobacco and re- 
straint: 

Sir Thomas More. — Pro pudor! There is a snuff- 
box on the mantelpiece — and thou re vilest tobacco! 

Montesinos. — Distinguish, I pray you, gentle 
ghost! I condemn the abuse of tobacco as filthy, 
implying in those words that it has its allowable and 
proper use. To smoke is, in certain circumstances, 
a wholesome practice; it may be regarded with a 
moral complacency as the poor man's luxury, and 
with liking by anyone who follows a lighted pipe in 

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the open air. But whatever may be pleaded for Its 
soothing and intellectuahsing effects, the odour 
within doors of a defunct pipe is such an abomina- 
tion, that I join in anathematising it with James, the 
best-natured of kings, and Joshua Sylvester, the 
most voluble of poets. 

Why by the way do not our clubs, if they 
will insist on the pipe banishment (though, 
Heaven be praised, there is no like injunction 
with us here) give us some such persuasive 
authority of the classics, in lieu of their despotic 
rules and regulations .^^ 

Afterward, Montesinos is able to add for his 
satisfaction — something which many of us un- 
fortunately cannot say — "Thank Heaven I bear 
about with me no habits which I cannot lay 
aside as easily as my clothes." What a boast- 
ful, supercilious, even though a truthful Mask! 

A little later on Sir Thomas is permitted to 
have his say concerning merriment and reason- 
ableness: 

Sir Thomas More. — Good Flesh and Blood, that 
was a nipping reply ! And happy man is his dole who 
retains in grave years, and even to gray hairs, enough 
of green youth's redundant spirits for such excursive- 
ness! He who never relaxes into sportiveness is a 
wearisome companion, but beware of him who jests 
at everything! Such men disparage by some ludi- 
crous association all objects which are presented to 



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their thoughts, and thereby render themselves inca- 
pable of any emotion which can either elevate or 
soften them, they bring upon their moral being an 
influence more withering than the blast of the desert. 
A countenance, if it be wrinkled either with smiles or 
with frowns, is to be shunned; the furrows which the 
latter leave show that the soil is sour, those of the 
former are symptomatic of a hollow heart. 

Now that we have heard from the ghostly 
Sir Thomas, let us give him the opportunity of 
speaking in the flesh on the subject of moder- 
ation, when he could do his own thinking and 
was not obliged to let Sou they do it for him. 

In that imaginary commonwealth Utopia — 
where he so often subtly gives one extreme in 
contrast to the other here on earth, so as to 
persuade us of the common sense of the middle 
course — ^he is describing with telling satire the 
contempt with which the gold of our idolatry 
is held there: 

Of the same metals, gold and silver, they likewise 
make chains and fetters for their slaves, to some of 
which, as a badge of infamy, they hang an ear-ring of 
gold, and make others wear a chain or a coronet of 
the same metal; and thus they take care by all pos- 
sible means to render gold and silver of no esteem; 
and from hence it is that while other nations part 
with their gold and silver as unwillingly as if one 
tore out their bowels, those of Utopia would look on 
their giving in all they possess of those metals (wheji 

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there were any use for them) but as the parting with 
a trifle, or as we would esteem the loss of a penny! 
They find pearls on their coasts, and diamonds and 
carbuncles on their rocks; they do not look after 
them, but, if they find them by chance, they polish 
them, and with them they adorn their children, who 
are delighted with them, and glory in them during 
their childhood; but when they grow to years, and 
see that none but children use such baubles, they of 
their own accord, without being bid by their parents, 
lay them aside, and would be as much ashamed to 
use them afterward as children among us, when 
they come to years, are of their puppets and other 
toys. 

There followed the effect of the good example. 
For when the Anemolian ambassadors came to 
Utopia full panoplied in all their gorgeous ap- 
parel, they were everywhere received with 
contempt. 

You might have seen the children who were grown 
big enough to despise their playthings, and who had 
thrown away their jewels, call to their mothers, push 
them gently, and cry out, "See that great fool, that 
wears pearls and gems as if he were yet a child!" 
while their mothers very innocently replied, "Hold 
your peace! this, I believe, is one of the ambassadors' 
fools." 

Thus the ambassadors learned the lesson 
which is manifest in this Club — ^but not taught, 
for we have no pedagogues among us, thanks to 
our lucky stars. 

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"Their plumes fell and they were ashamed of 
all that glory for which they had formerly val- 
ued themselves, and according laid it aside." 

Nor is it related that they were ever minded 
to put such things on again. 

By the way, would you believe it, this very 
stream into which our feet are dangling, runs 
and flows with its generous waters as you see 
it, in large part by reason of the comradeship 
of the men of this Club. Rather a strained 
view, think you? Well then let me tell you 
why you are wrong. 

The City of New York some years ago au- 
thorized a kind of financial municipal debauch, 
in its proposal to take the waters of Suffolk 
County, with the preliminary expenditure of 
scores of millions of dollars. Though the scheme 
was wholly unjustified, opposition to it seemed 
almost futile. I will not undertake to tell you 
in detail how the love of these waters by the 
few here, resulted in arousing a whole county to 
the menace to the beauty and utility of this 
part of Long Island. The scheme was utterly 
defenseless, for within sight almost was the 
water of the Esopus watershed, and thanks to 

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a determined stand taken, the residents of this 
county and not the politicians had a water 
holiday. Moreover under the proddings of the 
determined defense against vandalism and in- 
defensible extravagance, New York began to 
think about saving the water it had available, 
instead of entering upon this job; and to-day, 
in its Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, 
the City consumes less water than it did nine 
years ago. Altogether it is a suggestive chap- 
ter in municipal history that needs no com- 
ment. 

Before we start, suppose I confess to you that 
there is one thing about this brook so perfect 
in its beauty and associations, operating to de- 
tract just a bit from its old glory. Things called 
the brown trout — ^but really sharks and tooth- 
tongued cormorants and feeders upon trout — 
were some years ago introduced as an experi- 
ment into these waters, where by preying upon 
the native speckled beauty they grew mightily 
to filthy proportions. The designation of trout 
applied to this intruder equals in relevancy the 
definition of the crab — as a fish, red in color, 
that crawls backward. This the naturalist 

pronounced quite correct, except in the par^ 

IQQ 



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ticulars that a crab was not a fish, was not red 
and did not crawl backward. 

A goodly part of the duty of our boatman 
at the spawning season when these fish are in 
evidence — lurking concealed at other times in 
wait for their prey — is to keep their propagation 
within reasonable limits, for their extermination 
seems all but hopeless. One might well con- 
clude that the time has come for putting an end 
to the practice of importation into this country 
of the strange bird and the strange fish of un- 
known characteristics. The introduction of the 
brown trout here and elsewhere was about as 
appropriate as if the national government — 
while making gigantic efforts to prevent the 
slaughter of the wild bird — were to start in 
with the wholesale propagation of crow black- 
birds for the purpose of inducing them to lay 
their eggs in the nests of song-birds, the young 
of which they were ultimately to destroy. Not 
content with one pest, the English sparrow, we 
have now the starling, with the likelihood that 
we are to find in him a new thief which will still 
further rob the song-birds of their natural food 
and so threaten their extinction. 

Everywhere throughout the country, the tale 

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is the same as to these fish and where the war- 
fare against them is not unremitting, beautiful 
streams are beautiful no longer. Though it is 
well established that the burnt child dreads the 
fire, no such infantile philosophy is permitted 
to enter into the calculations of many grown- 
ups. 

As you sit here looking down this stretch of 
laughing water, with its gentle, eddying current 
and its bright, pebbly bottom, into which those 
long graceful, waving, peacock-tail-like weeds 
plunge their roots — what a wealth of beauty 
there is for the eye to feast upon ! Where think 
you is its counterpart? Here matted together 
are blue and white violets, such as grow only 
on the very edge of running brooks; and near 
them are wood anemones which scorn to ap- 
pear as individual specimens, but insist on car- 
peting the ground with their nodding grace. 
There at the turning below, that suggestion of 
blue is really a big bed of irises; and as we 
wade on we shall come across the like of them 
again and again, side by side with such marsh- 
marigolds as are worth many a long and tire- 
some journey to meet with. What beauty — on 

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the elevations beyond the edge of the brook — 
there is in the sun-drop, the yellow sorrel and 
the loose-strife so lavish of their charms. See, 
too, the wonderful admixture of color in the 
flowers of the white huckleberry blossom and 
the shadbush, in contrast with the lustrous red 
of the scarlet maple-tree. 

With these sights as a suggestion of what 
is to swing into our view, we make a first cast. 
Or rather you do, for my satisfaction shall be in 
seeing you do creditable execution with the fly, 
and in being privileged to hear your language as 
you now and then forget your "back-cast" and 
land that same effective fly high up in the snags 
of the maple. You do not need to be told by 
me that this procedure will be fatal, for the 
moment, to good temper, and likely to produce 
from you a flow of words which may be de- 
scribed as a weak reflection of the irreligious 
vocabulary of our boatman — when at his best 
or worst according to the point of view. 

Now after luck piled on luck, wait a moment 
until the boatman picks up from among the 
white pebbles of this hustling stream, the 
arrowhead and spearhead, the sight of which 
will carry your mind back to the red-skinned 

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fisherman whose haunts were here in days of 
old. I have scores of these trophies, the result 
of this man's sharp vision. Wait too a moment 
more, as he points out to you how the mallard 
builds her nest on the hummock of a miniature 
island, so that what little there is of scent to 
the drake or hen at nesting-time shall be less- 
ened for the trailing enemy, whatever shape it 
take. Again, let him show you the consum- 
mate cunning required to cope with the cun- 
ning of the mink he so successfully traps. For 
unless the trapper, after having ferreted out 
the runway, so manoeuvres that ingenuity 
shall wholly cover up ingenuity in the setting 
of the trap — just as the highest art is the con- 
cealment of art — there will never be mink for 
his reward. 

Yet if we permit him to continue entertaining 
and instructing us with his nature-knowledge, 
not only shall I have a dangerous rival in talk 
but you will never be at the end of your fishing. 
And surely the hobbies of fishermen and mono- 
logists ought not to be thus trifled with. 

As we see such secrets laid bare, as we hear 
such notes as the birds sing this day, and as the 
winds play on ^olian harps as of old, do we 

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not realize that everywhere for the observing, 
nature has set sign-posts as clear and un- 
mistakable as the "Stop Look and Listen" 
warnings at railroad-crossings? But do we not, 
both by night and day, as often disregard the 
one as "joy-riders" do the other? What the 
stars have to tell of the mythological past and 
of their part in the divine scheme of the uni- 
verse, apparently has for us little if any interest. 
With all our modern-day intelligence, we know 
less even of their names or their ways, than 
did the shepherd of old as he tended his flock 
under their inspiring radiance. What a com- 
mentary it all is on our indifference, and what 
a dread and consuming and corrupting disease 
nature-phobia is! 

In my experience as a boy, the res angustae 
domi of the country physician permitted only 
a short attendance at the boarding-school before 
the course at the University, and required that 
the beginnings of my education be at the pub- 
lic school. Yet I remember there the en- 
grossing Burritt's Geography of the Heavens, 
with the celestial chart and its mythological 
forms, which still appear to me in the sky, in 
place of the mere geometric figures you see there. 

8 105 



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Sometimes I wonder what substitute the pre- 
paratory school of to-day, commendable as it 
so often is, supplies for this elementary training 
in the rudiments of astronomy — capable of fur- 
nishing so much genuine satisfaction through- 
out life, in enabling one merely to know the 
stars in their constellation groupings. 

To many of us this glory of the heavens is not 
more real than to the young Irish school-boy, of 
whom this story was told, when the disappoint- 
ing Halley's Comet was the object of so much 
sky-gazing. A public-school teacher took some 
of his pupils into one of our parks for a view 
of the mighty traveler through space. Though 
it was not to be seen, this youngster, in his 
enthusiasm, thought he had identified it when 
he saw the brilliant Rigel or Betelgeuse. He 
was rebuked by being told that he was pointing 
to Orion. His surprise was evidenced by his 
comment: "Orion, is it? Well! well! but I 
t 'ought all the stars was Greeks." 

Be sure, however, that your knowledge of the 
heavens justifies the laugh you may be dis- 
posed to indulge in over this, lest Horace, who 
could write the suggestive Satire as well as the 
Ode, ask you: 

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Quid rides? mutato nomine de te 
Fabula narratur ; 

Nevertheless darkness is not far off and all 
digression must cease. Once more back to the 
rod and the treasures it has in store for the 
patient angler. Here at the turn in the brook, 
where it eddies around the gnarled root of a 
towering scarlet maple, I promise you there 
awaits the adept a trout of goodly proportions 
and rare beauty. No need now to consider your 
back-cast, for it is not the seductive fall of the 
fly that is to serve you; for down almost on 
your knees, you are to let it so drift in the 
whirling, chattering little current, that it will 
be swept around as a tempting morsel into the 
unseen pool. Yes it was good management 
and a resulting trout worth while. 

Now as we walk through this pool — for you 
will not get another rise here — surely the sight 
of the deer just beyond, leisurely and unafraid 
at his daily watercress meal, and another and 
still another, must persuade you that you are 
far from the customary haunts of many an 
unfortunate fellow in the world. 

I sometimes marvel that the true fisherman, 
even after his experience with salmon and other 

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big fish, can ever lose his zest for the trout- 
brook. To the true lover of nature and the 
rod, it is possible to find here a restfulness 
which one must seek long and often in vain 
for elsewhere. Granted that the one is a more 
ambitious, engrossing pastime than the other; 
by no means is this the whole story. For do 
we not too often ignore what is simple and full 
of charm for that which is grand and imposing? 
Do you remember what Carlyle says in one of 
his essays — where he is often more satisfying 
than when peering at the world as the cynic or 
at least severe critic, or painting heroic can- 
vases of the vivid history which has made 
epochs .f^ He is speaking of Burns: 

While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like 
mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bear- 
ing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers 
on their waves, this little valclusa fountain will also 
arrest the eye; for this also is of nature's own and 
most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths 
of the earth with a full, gushing current into the 
light of day; and often will the traveler turn aside 
to drink of its clear waters and muse among its rocks 
and pines! 

Now the limit of the "take" has been reached 
and your creel is full, for fortunately you have 
been industrious while I have been merely idle 

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and talkative. So you will have more leisure 
to see the wood-duck — and hear him, too, for 
he is worth listening to — as he darts with his 
variegated brilliant plumage across the sky; 
to notice many a red-start and jolly chickadee 
and towhee, and listen to those satisfying notes 
of the catbird, which, if so disposed, you can 
appropriate to yourself as his chatty congratu- 
lations over your expert handling of the rod. 
There too, are the red-winged blackbird and the 
flicker with their beauty of plumage and grace 
of flight, and the half-dozen warblers that chirp 
gaily enough though what they have to say is 
not much of a warble. But the song-sparrow 
and the vesper-sparrow and the brown thresher 
off in the clearing, will provide you with a 
genuine melody, while the catbird — after those 
congratulations — will reproduce for you the 
songs of all bird neighbors, so as to convince 
you that mimicry is a goodly part of his 
stock in trade. Here, low down among the 
boughs, is another black and white specimen 
of what some facetious person might term the 
lucus a non lucendo species — the warbler that 
does not warble. Unfortunately, it will be 
too late for us to hear the joyful orioles whis- 

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tling away, as only they have the knack for, 
while they hang their purse-nests on the top- 
most limbs of the grand elms which provide 
for us such bountiful shade about the old Club- 
house. But you shall have this enjoyment in 
the morning. 

We have passed the Shanty and Bunces — 
what memory for us here in those old names— 
until now Deep Water sends us out of the brook 
to the shore for our mile walk home. 

On leaving these waters, as if to persuade 
you that this really is enchanted ground, that 
plaintive song in the distance is from the 
raucous-throated blue jay — unprepossessing in 
everything but plumage, some suppose. No 
bird-book I know of properly describes the 
nesting note of the blue jay; perhaps it is not 
sung elsewhere. 

Then from the swampy depths, what a sym- 
phony of sound there is, which only the thrush 
has the genius for! Do you recall Edward 
Rowland Sill's lines: 

The thrush sings high on the topmost bow, — 
Louder, louder, low again; and now 
He has changed his tree, — ^you know not how. 
For you saw no flitting wing. 

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All the notes of the forest throng. 
Flute, reed, and string, are in his song; 
Never a fear knows he, nor wrong. 
Nor a doubt of anything. 

Small room for care in that soft breast; 
All weather that comes is to him the best. 
While he sees his mate close on her nest. 
And the woods are full of spring. 

He has lost his last year's love, I know, — 
He, too, — but 'tis little he keeps of woe; 
For a bird forgets in a year, and so 
No wonder the thrush can sing. 

Yet if you listen intently, perhaps in that 
note you may hear something of the lament 
over the loss of the old love. 

Now the day which has made history for 
each of us is past — for never with all my 
familiarity with it, do I wade this brook with- 
out a lively sense of thanksgiving, that for me 
its beauty can never grow old — and we go back 
to the beginning, to that group of men to whom 
I have attempted to prepare you for an intro- 
duction, and who will greet and entertain you 
as a Prince of the blood. 

As we saunter along, it seems to me that the 

obligation is mine for having been permitted to 

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bring you here, rather than yours for having been 
asked to come. Many a time I have longed for 
such an opportunity as this, when with an ap- 
preciative guest I might wander on through 
these streams and woods and fields, in the 
company too of the Masters who were privi- 
leged to write great thoughts for the true in- 
terpretation of all we have seen and heard 
and talked of. 

What a theme, too, I have had in that senti- 
ment among the members here, though as from 
time to time I have referred to it, it has seemed 
to me that the shrug of the shoulders betrayed 
only the patient and not the acquiescing listen- 
er! Perhaps you, along with so many others are 
disposed to frown upon any exhibition of senti- 
ment, as somewhat beneath the dignity of men 
grown to maturity. If so the view is wrong 
and at best plausible — only because sentiment 
is often confounded with some modern-day 
notions of sentimentality, and the man of senti- 
ment (would that the resourceful in word 
coinage would give him a name, Sentimentist 
even I could tolerate) with the sentimentalist. 
The two things and the two beings, neverthe- 
less, are as wide apart and with as little in 

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common as pride and vanity, virility and 
effeminacy, courage and bravado, emotion and 
affectation, as a walk and a strut. 

Sentiment has come to have its slightly dis- 
credited signification, very much as mirth has 
come to convey the suggestion of frivolity — not 
merely because of over-indulgence in it, but of 
any indulgence in inappropriate time, place, 
and circumstance. We are not for this reason 
to hold sentiment in light regard, unless we wish 
to have many of our conclusions reflect error. 
There are occasions — and they are not so in- 
frequent as many of us realize — when we must 
roughly brush sentiment aside, as we do the 
dust when it threatens to be a nuisance to the 
comfort and well-being of others as well as of 
ourselves. Still the loss would be immeasur- 
able and irreparable, if either dust or sentiment 
should disappear from our lives. 

Fortunately for our own good we are not per- 
mitted to destroy or change the character of 
dust, but only to brush it aside so that it may 
continue to fulfill its part in the economy and 
the beauty of the world. But sentiment we 
can, if we will, destroy or transform into quite 
another thing which — to draft into service ex- 

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pressive slang — may be said to be "gush"; 
and when sentiment has degenerated into this 
it is all but dead. Merely because we see 
the abuse of sentiment among some of its un- 
thinking votaries, do not let us cease to be 
grateful that in the big world too there is this 
sentiment which has grown here into such 
flower and strength. 

The scientist now tells us that but for dust — 
objectionable and uninviting as it so often is — 
water would no longer be precipitated in rain 
for the thirsting earth; and that if dust did 
not intervene between us and the sights we 
see, nature would be without much of her glory 
and the sky no longer beautiful and blue. And 
when we cease to behold men and things with 
vision steeped in sentiment, we shall have only 
sorry prospects in life. 

Yes as I think of all this, I have well-nigh 
determined to run the risk of the censure of 
critic and cynic and put the substance of our 
walk and talk into print, so that there may be 
some record of a story which should have been 
told long ago. 

Here among these men I should be as con- 

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fident of its appreciation, as Horace was of the 
favorable judgment of mankind when he penned 
his non omnis moriar: for they, if none others, 
would understand its meaning and its spirit. 
Of that much at least I am certain. 

Then, too, there is the probability that our 
own children — and it may be their children too 
as time goes on and they in turn take the vacant 
chairs here — would turn its pages so as to learn 
how they as well may repeat for themselves 
such a rambling journey as we have made 
together to-day; and that is an inviting prob- 
ability. 

And it is barely possible too that a few kin- 
dred spirits in that outside world, should they 
come across the story, would welcome it if only 
for its sentiment. 

*4* »t* «^ 4« «bi «Sm 

•!• *i* *n ^ *#• ^f* 

Well at last here you are, late at night though 
it be, in my room where so much of my life 
centers; where you may sleep to the music of 
the waters as they go over the dam to the old 
mill-race below, and so on to Great River and 
to the bay and to the sea. Abundant too are 
those waters as well as musical; and surely in 
these days 

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"more water glideth by the mill 
Than wots the miller of." 

for there is no miller now in that mill. 

You can dream here of what you saw and 
what you heard while the sun was in the heavens 
and after it had set; and of to-morrow and of 
more fishing on your part and less talking on 
my part, and when you are to know the strike 
and run and struggle of the striped bass. As 
you awake and see the dawn-clouds and then 
the sun in the mirror-lake at your feet, and 
make ready for another day you will under- 
stand how hopeless it would be, if you under- 
took to give adequate expression of your grati- 
tude for your excursion into this wonderland 
of ours. 

What, are you too immune from the sleeping 
sickness .f^ Well no threat to postpone the say- 
ing of Good Night has terrors for me, my 
friend, for I am an old offender here they say, 
in postponing that time. I have my justifica- 
tion too, for I dislike to have these critics of 
mine denied the high privilege of sitting up 
late themselves so as to be able, among other 
things, to tell me why I ought to be in the land 

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of dreams. Moreover I read poetry and am 
able to call upon Shelley to be my advocate. 

Good night? ah! no; the hour is ill 
Which severs those it should unite; 
Let us remain together still. 
Then it will be good night. 

Now that my critics know the real reason for 
my late hours, will they ever have the un- 
graciousness to call me to account again? 

Then too — for we must not ignore the earth- 
ly things — there is that toothsome, seductive, 
midnight supper at which Carl is host. 

Yes, you are right, it was a feast in more 
senses than one — ^that dinner, where all these 
Knights sat around the one Table, which was 
just as well provided with good things to eat 
and drink and see and hear and as much en- 
titled to be famous, as if it had been quite 
Round. 

You still wish to ask me questions about 
some of these men? Well, for this once, you 
shall have your way, seeing that I have been 
so long master of ceremonies. Oi facile princeps 
George you already know. The member on 
his left, whom as you say you heard referred 

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to as "De something or other," and who 

had the odd, affectionate nickname of Goickie, 
and who told stories in such style, that you be- 
gan to smile long before the story was well 
under way, and were laughing yourself tired 
before it was finished — why he is as kindly and 
considerate as his wit is keen. 

When the spirit moves him, as it so often 
does, what he says is "argument for a week, 
laughter for a month, and a good jest forever." 

A former member here had an uncontrollable 
passion for the purchase of inexpensive artificial 
flies, but a positive genius in effecting, step by 
step, profitable exchanges of them with other 
members, for the best to be had for love or 
money. Who but this man could have said 
that the member had succeeded in getting to- 
gether probably the finest collection anywhere 
on earth, as the result of his "Arbitrage in 
flies"? 

One of our members (not indisposed on oc- 
casion to have a commercial stake in the broils 
of our sister nations on this side of the Atlantic) 
had a touch of rheumatism in his arm. Others 
like our mirth-provider can play golf. Yet 
who but he could have said, by way of comment 

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upon our member's ailment, that he would not 
care to give that man, even in such condition, 
"a stroke a hole" in selling a battle-ship to a 
South American Republic? 

These two buildings like wings of the Club- 
house, are "Annexes" in which some of the 
members have their own rooms, varying in 
desirability. Perhaps the least desirable one 
of them all, had been owned by A. I happened 
to mention at the dinner-table that B had 
bought the room of A. Who but this man of 
infinite jest, could have said that he was pained 
at my regrettable lack of precision in speech — 
inasmuch as the fact was that instead of B 
having bought the room of A, A had sold the 
room to B? 

Who but he could have said — no I must de- 
sist or we shall never get to the others. Yet 
before we take leave of this genial soul, let 
me say Heaven be praised that, in this work- 
a-day world (and he has been of it) there is one 
man who disports himself with speech, like those 
in the Mermaid of old, as if he 

Had meant to put his whole wit in a Jest 
And resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life. 

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Time does not suflSce for me to be able to tell 
you all about Sam, who was, pleasant to remem- 
ber, on my right. I may say confidentially, 
that now and then he very solemnly pretends 
to wear a frown, but we know it is only a mask 
— so thin and transparent that we can all see 
the engaging laugh behind it. Accept the 
statement from me that he is of such abound- 
ing charity, that if he were a judge and held 
Court Sessions here, the most hardened of- 
fender would be likely to escape punishment, 
or at most receive some kind of benevolent 
reprimand — even though the tears the fellow 
wept were of the Shakespearian variety, born in 
an onion. There are the other Sams too — fit 
company for these members here. 

Yes, that was Frank on the right of George 
the First and on my left — thus sandwiching me 
so favorably, and yet leaving me near the 
throne; and though there is only one Frank, 
he is a host in himself. But let him be warned 
that, if by any accident he should ever part 
company with his smile and jovial greeting, 
no one would be able to recognize him and he 
would pass for a stranger within these gates. 

There were the several Georges on the one 

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side of the table, honored in their several 
walks of life, whom you would admire and like 
better, the oftener you had the privilege of 
meeting them here. One of them is as kindly 
in thought and word and deed as he is lavish 
in his "no trump" bids, and this is saying a 
volume; all of them are as good fellows as 
you would care to meet or overtake in a day's 
travel, and the George on the other side has a 
heart as big as his frame, and as generous as 
his greeting. Never were there " Four Georges " 
or five Georges like these. Alas, not long ago 
another George beloved by us all went away 
to join the absent ones, and our Bayard, 
sans peur et sans reproche as the Chevalier 
of old, and the other dear fellows — Coch- 
rane and Gussie and Phil and Suydam — went 
away too. 

Harry across the table — as young in spirit as 
his own boys whose big brother he really is — as 
you thought, is r. true friend of mine (as he has 
been of many another) and has been so since 
the days when his friendship meant much. 
Hal by his side is a man you may be sure of in 
foul weather as in fair weather, stanch and 

steadfast in the faith of friendship. Suppose 
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we say of the Harrys, Hal, and Henry alike, that 
they are here at home and abroad in the world. 
Prince Hals? And this is saying much; for 
as we recall, Prince Hal, though a frolicsome 
soul, yet had the dignity — ^but none of the 
"false and idle ceremony" — of a king among 
men. 

No, John and his companionable neighbor are 
not brothers but father and son — the son growing 
more like the "Pere" as the days go by. Nor, 
however long the ex-mayor may live, would he 
wish to listen to higher praise or more comfort- 
ing prophecy than this; and if, as is our privi- 
lege, you often saw them together like two play- 
fellows, you would know that their love for 
each other is little short of a religion. 

Who was the one sitting near them? Why, 
that was my partner. I ought not, perhaps, to 
speak much of my own family, but let me say 
that, in the score of years we have kept com- 
pany together, I have never heard him utter an 
ungenerous or unjust word; and you will search 
long for his like. 

Yes, you are right, there is only one Howard 
here; but he is the peer of all the Howards 
anywhere and of any time. 

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But one Lucius, too; and none can shoot shot 
straighter than he with gun or the witty yet 
always kindly word. He is the Poet Laureate 
of the Club. He can compose the Limerick 
and the whimsical doggerel verse with the 
facility of the best at the art — and art it is, 
make no mistake; for it calls for not only 
sense but sensibility. Even with the punning 
rhyme he is a past master, agreeing doubtless 
with Thomas Hood that 

However critics may take offense, 
A double meaning has double sense. 

Would that I were at liberty to quote a few 
stanzas from the delightful cantos of the Iliad 
of Islip, about the genial "Mayor" and the 
other heroes. Many a man responsible for sol- 
emn lines of poetry would make no headway 
with the kind that Lucius and his guild can 
write. 

Nor do men of distinction hesitate to enjoy 
such verse. President Wilson is fond of it, and 
no wonder, since he lived in an atmosphere 
where such things were cultivated abundantly. 
Laurence Hutton, of delightful memory, once 
told me that there was no word in the English 

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language for which one of the genial spirits of 
Princeton could not furnish a rhyme. There 
was never any doubt of this after the evening, 
when at a little gathering he was challenged to 
find one for chrysanthemum. There was no 
interval between the challenge and the lines: 

The boy that can his anthem hum 
Shall have his white chrysanthemum. 

Hutton himself was an adept at the art, 
though very unappreciative of his accomplish- 
ment. One delightful day during a summer 
we were both spending at North East Harbor, 
I was reading with him the proof-sheets of one 
of his "Literary Landmark" books. While we 
were chatting together, he asked me in his 
peculiar way if I could explain why in the world 
it was that having written .... books he had 

received for the past year only $ in 

royalties. My answer was that I could think 
of no reason, except perhaps that he had 
gotten into the way of publishing the kind of 
book which was far away from the charm of 
such a story as A Boy I Knew. I added that 
many of the lines I had heard him recite when 
engagingly reminiscent, as he so uniformly was, 
did belong to literature. He pooh-poohed this, 

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but doubtless you will agree with me that I was 
right and he was wrong as you hear the fol- 
lowing : 

It seems that Hutton and a friend of his, 
while spending the winter in Rome, had a 
rather depressing attack of indigestion from too 
much chianti. After some search they found a 
hostelry in which fairly palatable beer could be 
gotten, and thenceforth beer was substituted 
for claret. Shortly afterward his friend went 
to Verona, in order to make a study of some of 
the finer fagades there, and facetiously sent to 
Hutton a glowing account of how much better 
Verona beer was than Roman beer. In his 
special-delivery retort, Hutton, as you will see, 
was quite equal to the occasion: 

I do not wish to shock you, sir. 
Or fill you full of fear, 
But this I hope you won't forget 
That Romeo and Juliet, 
According to Shakespeare, 
When living in Verona once 
Were laid out on one bier. 

L'Envoi 
So beware of Verona beer. 

August, with a boy of the same name sitting 
by him, you knew. His father, too, was a 

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member of the Club, so that there have been 
three generations of the family here. A long 
time ago that father, in speaking one day of 
the things which are of moment in life, said to 
me that one of his chief joys as the years went 
by was that this son was to be the worthy 
custodian of his name and fortune. More than 
this has come true so diligent has the son been 
with his inheritance; for he has linked that 
name inseparably with enterprises of mighty 
import to this generation. By the construc- 
tion of our subway system he has given New 
York City the opportunity to become a real 
metropolis, and he is now building the Cape 
Cod Canal to shorten the route and lessen the 
perils of the sea for the ships of commerce. 
Each enterprise, too, had previously been pro- 
nounced impracticable by men of broad vision 
and large experience; but, as has been said in 
the varying phrases of ancient and modern 
days, the gods favor the brave. Yet his good- 
fellowship to those who know him well, is quite 
the equal of his wisdom and foresight; and thus 
you see the ease with which, under right con- 
ditions, one can put a biography into a para- 
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There were more than one William — sweet 
Williams, I should term them, if I dared be so 
facetious. One of them you heard now and 
then ask the dealer at cards to " wait a moment," 
before supplying the demand of the player next 
him. But all of them would make the same 
request of you out in the larger world, if there- 
by they might have the privilege in advance 
of yourself of doing a good turn to the other 
fellow in life. 

The Admiral there — the equal of any that 
ever trod the deck of a ship — as you recall, 
resigned his commission because a politically 
late-departed high government oflScial insisted 
that an M.D. should command the hospital 
ship. By the way, when this happened one of 
America's best humorists, in the choicest of 
letters of congratulation to the Admiral on the 
uncompromising stand he had taken, expressed 
deep concern as to the report that this same 
high official was to put a chiropodist in com- 
mand of our foot-soldiers. 

Yes there were Louis and Crav/ford who are 
brothers of us all, too; and the Club would pass 
an unanimous vote — for it would summarily 
expel any member who voted "no" — if it would 

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be effective to compel more frequent visits 
from them both and their absent brother as 
well. The Governor and Charles over there — 
such is the salutary atmosphere of this place — 
were, I am sure, swapping views having little 
to do with the manufacturing-plant or the 
syndicate agreement. If I did not think that 
Fairfax — a man of big affairs and big sympa- 
thies — would discharge me as his hired legal 
man, I could tell you that out of the South 
there has come no finer product in the form 
and substance of the true man than he. I 
could wish you no better luck than to sit^often, 
as you did for a moment to-night, by the side 
of our only Honorary Member entertaining 
"Hub Clarke" and listen to his once-upon-a- 
time fact and legend of the Club. It is a pity 
that the yarns he spins are not likely to be 
preserved in the printed page, for he shows no 
disposition to make authorship his hobby. 
Still he is not too old to learn anything he turns 
his mind to; and I assure him that if he writes 
as well as he talks, his book will be one of the 
season's "best sellers" here and elsewhere. 

You are right, Edwin is in fact what he 
seemed to you, a genial, whole-souled fellow; 

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and I have no trifling admiration for his intel- 
ligence, seeing that he invariably addresses me 
as "The Learned One." The others here, to 
my humiliation, when they refer to me as the 
Owl, have no thought of that bird's wisdom 
but only of his proclivity for sitting up late o' 
nights. 

There was Aaron Pennington, strong of wind 
and limb, who can row as well as play with the 
youngest here, a veritable host in himself. 
Surely wisdom has reserved for him: "Length 
of days in her right hand, and in her left hand 
riches and honor." Heaven grant that the 
length of days may be prolonged to the one 
hundred and twenty-three years of Aaron of 
old; and I do not need to tell you that the 
riches of his honor will keep pace with the 
years. None more than companionable, jovial 
Geraldyn and Arthur and "Captain Phil" and 
"Doctor Jack" and "Brad" and Walter and 
Casimir are surer of the generous welcome 
within these walls. Then too there were Char- 
lie and Otto and John B. and Edward, whose 
names are writ large in the financial world. 
Yet no one here envies them that distinction, 
but on the contrary we rather commiserate 

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with them because they are not oftener here, 
rather than there. 

Percy of the younger generation, to the de- 
spair of mothers still remains wedded to the 
main business of his life, of providing a delight- 
ful time for the other fellow — notwithstanding 
the persuasive example of his partner Benedick 
Buell, who comes back to us now and then 
with never so charming a Beatrice. 

Last but by no means least, there was Fred 
of Commodore fame. Yes, he has reduced to 
ownership and possession a goodly portion of 
the world's goods, but he has in still greater 
abundance the esteem of his acquaintances and 
the love of his friends. 

I wish some of the other members had been 
with us, so that I might tell you of them too; 
but take it from me that they are all con- 
genial company with the rest, and they could 
not possibly have a more acceptable or a more 
eloquent tribute. 

Let me add to these biographies in epitome 
two incidents illustrative of the abounding 
sentiment here. 

While shooting once in a "Blind" with the 
Admiral, and speaking of this distinguishing 

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trait among us, he suggested that in a sense his 
outfit was a very good illustration of it. For, 
said he, "without the knowledge of any of the 
owners, I have on the hat of George, the under- 
coat of Sam, the overcoat of Harry, the boots 
of George, and the gloves of Arthur, and have 
taken the gun of Edwin and the ammunition 
of Howard." He added by way of comment, 
that nowhere else in the lands he knew of — 
and he is a well-traveled man — was there the 
fellowship which would permit one to do like- 
wise, without fear of pains and penalties or at 
least of the forbidding, disinheriting look. 

Recently one of the members of the Club was 
stricken down by a great grief which took from 
him, for the time being, all the joy and hope of 
life. After a while he returned one day when 
only a few members were likely to be present. 
As I put my arm through his and wandered 
over to this room where we now are — so that I 
might hand him a little book containing much 
of real consolation, even to one stricken as he 
had been — he said to me with breaking voice 
and tear-filled eye: "How like a great peace 
it is to come back home and be with the boys 

again." 

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If you would know the avocations of these 
men — ^for their vocation is to be members of 
this Club — why you can consult the Directory 
of Directors, or the Social Register, or the Blue 
Book, or a Who's Who compilation or what 
you will, and satisfy yourself; but the search 
would not interest me or them. 

Understanding now all that I have told you 
and all that you yourself have seen of these 
men, are you not prepared to believe with me 
that as they filed out from the dining-room 
into our one big room, they were joined by 
those non-resident ones who used to frequent 
these feasts, but who alas will never be here 
again in the earthly sense? 

We referred during the day to Longfellow's 
Robert Burns, Do you think that Longfellow 
was entitled to extend a warmer welcome to 
that poet of another land, than we to these 
dear old companions of ours? No, never let 
one of them have less from us! 

His presence haunts this room to-night, 
A form of mingled mist and light 

From that far coast. 
Welcome beneath this room of mine! 
Welcome! this vacant chair is thine. 

Dear guest and ghost! 
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Perhaps someone may afterward seek to per- 
suade you that you merely went with a garru- 
lous host to a prosaic club, but you will know 
how foolish such a notion is, for you have been 
more than a king in his kingdom this day. 
And as we say Good Night, surely you will agree 
with me that these men would prefer that you 
remember them — ^not as distinguished and suc- 
cessful in that outside world — but as members 
here in this abode of reasonableness and fel- 
lowship and sentiment and of nature's loveli- 
ness; where the Right of Sanctuary permits 
the service of no warrant for their apprehen- 
sion by Black Care or sordid thought, and 
where many a reassuring dream of life comes 
true. 

Good Night then let it be; and if you care to 
consult my wishes think of me here among them 
all just as 

One of the Members. 



